AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY

This third edition of An Introduction to Sociology: Feminist Perspectives reaffirms the

contribution of feminist perspectives and research to sociology and introduces students
and readers to the wide range of feminist contributions to key areas of sociological
concern. This completely revised edition includes updated and expanded theoretical
and empirical material as well as two new chapters on sexuality and media culture.

The book begins with a consideration of the relationship between feminism and the
sociological imagination, focusing on the feminist critique of malestream sociology. It
then considers feminist sociological theory, taking account of debates and issues
relating to post-feminism and post-colonialism. Various sociological themes are
considered from a broad range of feminist perspectives and in the light of current
feminist research, including: stratification and inequality, education, the life course,
the family and the household, health, illness and caring, sexuality, crime and criminal
justice, politics, the mass media and popular culture, and feminist knowledge.

The book is especially designed to be useful at an introductory level and includes:

• careful consideration of key sociological concepts

• exploration of ongoing debates within sociology
• a range of theoretical approaches
• up-to-date research from a range of international sources
• a broad range of international literature
• bullet-point chapter summaries
• annotated suggestions for further reading

Pamela Abbott is Director of the Centre for Equality and Diversity at Glasgow
Caledonian University. Claire Wallace is Professor of Sociology at the University of
Aberdeen. Melissa Tyler is a Lecturer in Organisation Studies at Loughborough
University.
An Introduction to Sociology
Feminist Perspectives
Third edition

Pamela Abbott, Claire Wallace and Melissa Tyler

First published 1990
by Routledge
Second edition published 1997
This third edition published 2005
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 1997, 2003 Pamela Abbott and Claire Wallace
© 2005 Pamela Abbott, Claire Wallace and Melissa Tyler
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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ISBN 0–415–31258–2 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–31259–0 (pbk)
Contents

List of tables ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xvii

1 Introduction: feminism and the sociological imagination 1

Setting the agenda 1
Gendering the sociological imagination 4
Ideologies of sexual difference 6
The sex–gender distinction 8
The feminist critique of malestream sociology 9
Towards a feminist sociology 11
Conclusions 14
Summary 14
Further reading 15

2 Feminist sociological theory 16

Feminist perspectives and sociology 17
An invitation to feminist sociology 18
The insights of sociology 19
The historical context of sociology 21
Theory and theorising 23
Feminist theory 27
Feminist debates on sexual difference 29
Feminist theoretical perspectives 31
Postfeminism 51
Conclusions 55
Summary 56
Further reading 56

3 Stratification and inequality 57

Gender-based stratification 59
Social class-based stratification 64
Race, ethnicity and stratification 70
Disability and stratification 76

v
CONTENTS

Global stratification 80
Conclusions 87
Summary 87
Further reading 88

4 Education 89
Girls’ educational achievements 91
The history of girls’ education in Britain 95
Explaining girls’ continued disadvantage 99
Global inequalities in literacy and education 107
Feminist perspectives on education 109
Masculinity and education 114
Conclusions 115
Summary 115
Further reading 116

5 The life course 117

Childhood 117
Adolescence 126
Adulthood 132
Ageing 135
Conclusions 141
Summary 142
Further reading 143

6 The family and the household 144

Sociological perspectives on the family 145
Feminist approaches to the family 147
Industrialisation and the origins of the family wage 148
Diversity in family forms and practices 151
Familial ideology 157
Gendered experiences of family life 158
Conclusions 168
Summary 169
Further reading 170

7 Health, illness and caring 171

Women and medicine 172
Iatrogenic medicine 180
Gender, power and medicine 183
Women as providers of health care 190
Conclusions 196
Summary 197
Further reading 197

vi
 CONTENTS

8 Sexuality 198
Essentialist perspectives on sexuality 199
Sociological perspectives on sexuality 203
Postmodern sexualities 206
Feminist perspectives on sexuality 210
Women’s sexual experiences and attitudes 213
Sexuality and power relations 215
Race, ethnicity and sexuality 225
Sexuality and HIV/AIDS 226
Conclusions 228
Summary 229
Further reading 229

9 Work and organisation 231

Gender ideology and the sexual division of labour 232
Industrialisation and the gendered organisation of work 234
The gendered division of domestic labour 236
Men, women and the labour market 240
Feminist studies of the workplace 250
Gender and the professions 258
Managerial work 261
Sexuality and work 264
Explaining the gendered labour market 265
The changing nature of work 267
Conclusions 270
Summary 270
Further reading 271

10 Crime, violence and criminal justice 272

Explaining crime – women as criminals 272
Men, women and crime 274
The need for feminist theory 278
Feminist theories of crime 279
Violence, fear and social control 286
Crimes against women 288
Women, violence and male power 299
Conclusions 300
Summary 301
Further reading 301

11 Politics 303
Men, women and voting studies 303
Defining feminist politics 306
Feminist political activism 307
Women and the state 311
Conclusions 316

vii
CONTENTS

Summary 316
Further reading 316

12 Mass media and popular culture 318

‘Culture’: a brief history of the concept 322
The sociology of culture and the emergence of cultural studies 323
Cultural studies as ideology studies 325
Studying media culture 327
Sociological perspectives on media culture 329
Youth culture and rebellion 335
Postmodern cultural forms 338
The feminist critique of cultural studies 340
Feminist studies of media culture 344
Masculinity and media culture 351
Feminist perspectives on language 354
New media technologies and cyberfeminism 359
Conclusions 361
Summary 363
Further reading 363

13 Feminist knowledge 364

Doing feminist research 366
Feminist epistemologies 370
Epistemic communities 382
Conclusions 383
Summary 384
Further reading 385

References 386
Additional web-based resources 411
Author index 412
Subject index 420

viii
Tables

3.1 Sex–gender order 63

3.2 Registrar General’s scale 68
3.3 National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC) 68
3.4 Economic activity status of disabled people by sex, UK, 2001 77
4.1 Obtainment of 2+ A level passes or 3+ SCE Highers by sex, UK, 2000/1 92
4.2 Full- and part-time enrolments in higher education by sex, UK,
1970/1–1992/3 93
4.3 Achievements at GCSE/GNVQ by ethnicity and sex, UK, 2003 96
6.1 Cohabitation by sex and relationship type, UK, 2002 153
6.2 Western European women never married by the age of 45–49,
c.1900 and 2000 153
6.3 Family status of women in the EU, 1996 154
6.4 Family type and marital status of lone mothers, UK, 1971–2001 155
8.1 Rubin’s hierarchy of sex 205
8.2 Attitudes to sexual relations, 1998 210
9.1 Occupational segmentation of employees and self-employed
(aged 16 and over), UK, 2003 243
9.2 Part-time employees (aged 16 and over), UK, 2003 244
9.3 Male and female employees working full- or part-time, UK, 2003 244
9.4 Part-time employees (aged 16 and over) by reason for working
part-time, UK, 2003 245
9.5 Gender pay gap, 2003 247
9.6 Employment in selected professional and associated professional
occupations, UK, 2000 259
9.7 Female share of managers, UK, 1990–2001 261
10.1 Persons sentenced or cautioned for indictable offences by sex and
age, in England and Wales, 2002 275
10.2 Offenders found guilty of indictable offences at all courts by type
of offence, in England and Wales, 2002 275
10.3 Selected sentences awarded by sex, 2002 276
10.4 Proportion sentenced to immediate custody and average term
awarded, by sex and court, 2002 276
10.5 Offenders found guilty at all courts by sex and type of offence, in
England and Wales, 1977–2001 277

ix
TABLES

10.6 Self-report of delinquent acts and offences committed by girls in

research by Shaklady Smith (1978) 284
10.7 Fear of crime: sex, age and type of crime 287
10.8 Feeling unsafe at night by country 287
10.9 Objective risk of violent crime – selected age ranges 287

x
Preface

In feminist terms the twentieth century began, in Britain at least, with the suffragettes
and ended with the Spice Girls and the popular perception, as Germaine Greer wryly
observed, that ‘feminism has served its purpose and should now eff off’ (1999, p. 5).
During the intervening period, feminism achieved profound success, improving the
social, political, cultural and economic position of women in a whole range of ways.
At the same time, feminist theory, particularly in the last three decades or so, has made
a significant contribution to rethinking many aspects of the ways in which we make
sense of society. Yet, many post-feminists consider that feminism has now achieved
its aims and is therefore no longer relevant (or welcome) politically or theoretically,
given the diversity of womanhood; or that feminism has simply gone ‘too far’ towards
benefiting women, resulting in a gender ‘backlash’. Others claim that feminism has not
gone far enough in addressing social inequalities, and that those gains that have been
made have focused too specifically on the needs of middle-class, white professional
women living in the West. In many respects therefore, feminism (including feminist
sociology) is currently engaged in something of a ‘stock-taking exercise’, reflecting
critically on questions such as how to address the diverse experiences of women whilst
maintaining some notion of commonality, at the same time as examining the relevance
of the feminist project at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
For us, the relevance of feminism as both a political and a theoretical commitment,
and its centrality to sociology as a critical project, becomes immediately apparent
when we step outside of these debates and locate feminism and its relationship to
sociology within the broader social totality.
As Goran Therborn (2004, p. 17) notes in his discussion of patriarchy throughout
the course of the twentieth century, ‘in the beginning of our story all significant societies
were clearly patriarchal’. However, in many societies, he argues, patriarchy was forced
into retreat during the last century, a process he describes as de-patriarchalization
(p. 73). In most countries, the legal rights of women and girls have been extended, and
the expansion of education and paid work has increased women’s autonomy in many
respects. Dramatic socio-economic, political and cultural changes have undermined
the authority of individual husbands and fathers, and of men’s power over women
as a group. Yet this process of ‘de-patriarchalization’ has by no means been even. As
Therborn puts it, ‘the most important feature of the twentieth-century change of patri-
archy is not its universal tendency. It is the variation in outcome as well as in timing’
(p. 129). This means that there are many areas of the world where patriarchy is still

xi
PREFACE

well entrenched; South and West Asia, North and sub-Saharan Africa, are notable
examples. As he puts it, in these areas of the world

The entanglement of patriarchy and misogyny with caste and religion through
rituals and rules of pollution and purity provides male domination with a deep
social anchor, largely out of reach for a secular bureaucracy and its discourse of
equal rights.
(Therborn, 2004, p. 112)

Even in those Western societies shaped by a commitment to equality, it is no

exaggeration to argue that the difference between men and women continues to shape
almost every aspect of our lives. Jan Morris, who started life as a male journalist called
James and became a woman when she was in her thirties, sums up some of the
experiences of living as both a man and a woman in her book Conundrum:

We are told that the social gap between the sexes is narrowing, but I can only
report that having, in the second half of the twentieth century, experienced life in
both roles, there seems to me no aspect of existence, no moment of the day, no
contact, no arrangement, no response, which is not different for men and women.
(Morris, 1997, p. 1)

But as feminists have argued, men and women’s respective experiences of the social
world are not only shaped by difference, but by a hierarchical ordering of difference,
what feminists have called ‘the gender order’. This means that most societies value men
and masculinity more so than women and femininity; the relationship between
men and women is not simply shaped by difference, but by inequality. The conse-
quences of this are summed up by an Amnesty International briefing to the United
Nations on the global nature of discrimination against women:

In every corner of the world, women and girls continue to face horrifying violence,
systematic discrimination and other serious human rights abuses. They are beaten
and killed in their homes, attacked in their communities, raped and brutalized in
war, turned away as refugees, denied the right to education and employment, and
are excluded from public life and exploited – simply because of their gender.
(Amnesty International, 2002, p. 3)

It is with an awareness of the extent to which, while the lives of many people
(particularly those living in the West) have improved considerably in recent years,
this is certainly not the case for the majority of the world’s women, that we have
approached this third edition of An Introduction to Sociology: Feminist Perspectives. In the
decade or so since the first edition of the book, the debates within feminism and within
sociology have clearly moved on considerably. When the second edition was published
in 1997, it seemed that debates about postmodernism and media culture were
beginning to displace more traditional, sociological preoccupations with work, family
and stratification and also, to some extent, feminism itself. In the intervening years,
feminist research has begun to reaffirm its commitment to these key areas of sociology,

xii
 PREFACE

however, at the same time as incorporating new ways of thinking about established
topics. Black and post-colonial perspectives have been brought to bear, for instance,
on traditional sociological concerns with issues such as social class, the household
and the sexual division of labour.
The original text embodied the argument that an appreciation of society from
women’s perspective leads to a recasting of traditional sociological distinctions
between, for example, work and the family or between violent crime and sexuality.
Now, the impact of feminist scholarship has led to a recasting and, to some extent, a
transgression of former boundaries between disciplines, as well as within them. It has
also problematised the idea of a single women’s perspective, emphasising instead
the diversity of women’s experiences and viewpoints. Much of the material in the
first and second editions remains relevant, but in this third edition we have taken
account of the shifting parameters and interests of feminism, and of diverse groups of
men and women. We have brought the empirical data up to date and included material
on new debates and issues to which feminist perspectives have made a significant
contribution.
Our own position is that while there are important differences in women’s experi-
ence, there are also important commonalities; while acknowledging the contributions
postmodernist scholars have made to the study of gender, we would nevertheless
argue that sociology as a critical discipline can help to elucidate women’s position
and that feminist sociology still has an important contribution to make – yet one that
is by no means universally recognised. We use the term ‘feminist’ here to refer to those
who see women as exploited, devalued and oppressed, who are committed to chang-
ing this, and who consequently adopt a critical perspective towards dominant
intellectual traditions, modes of social organisation and cultural belief systems that
have ignored or justified women’s oppression. Our position as feminist sociologists is
problematic in this sense, as our critical perspective is sociological, but as feminists
we are also critical of sociology itself, for the ways in which it has tended to ignore,
marginalise and exclude both women, and feminist perspectives.
Sociologists have now – in the main – taken some of the feminist criticisms
of malestream sociology on board, but feminist arguments still tend to be ignored or
marginalised in many areas of sociological thought. Although feminism has had
more of an impact in sociology than in many other disciplines, it is still the case that
the reconceptualisation of the discipline, which, we would argue, is necessitated by
acceptance of the feminist critique, has not taken place in many areas of the discipline,
particularly in sociological theory. Despite the proliferation of feminist studies over
the past thirty years or so in sociology, their impact has been uneven. In this sense,
our book still stands as one of the only feminist commentaries, and as something of a
corrective to the other introductory textbooks in sociology.
The first edition of the textbook was written from a British perspective – we were
British sociologists who had spent our working lives in Britain and were reporting
largely British research. However, the textbook has been used in many countries
of the world and translated into several languages. Moreover, over the last ten years
or so British sociology has begun to reflect on its own ethnocentrism. To take account
of the wider readership and shifts in both sociological and feminist thought we have
therefore sought to introduce a more comparative perspective to this third edition,

xiii
PREFACE

by incorporating a broader range of international literature and empirical data, and by

rethinking our own perspectives.
The result, intended for students and for the general reader interested in under-
standing the feminist contribution to sociology, provides an introduction to feminist
perspectives in sociology that stands on its own or can be used in conjunction with
more conventional introductory textbooks. For those readers who want to incor-
porate feminist perspectives into their sociological understanding we suggest reading
the appropriate chapter in this book after reading the corresponding chapter of a
conventional textbook. The chapters in this book do not have to be read in the order
in which they are written. We would suggest reading Chapters 1 and 2 first, however,
as these give a broad overview of both the feminist critique of malestream sociology,
and of the range of theoretical perspectives that feminists have developed. After that,
you can follow your own interests or read the relevant chapters in line with the
sequencing of the syllabus that you are following.
Of course, we are not presenting this as a ‘true’ or universal account of social reality,
nor do we see ourselves as neutral scientists merely recounting the work of others. Nor
are we claiming that our coverage of sociological concepts, topics and debates is in any
sense exhaustive. All knowledge is partial and provisional, and this applies as much
to feminist as to malestream knowledge. Feminism is not one theoretical perspec-
tive within sociology, but a broad range of complex (and often contradictory) ideas.
However, feminist knowledge has made an important contribution to sociology and has
challenged the basic theoretical assumptions of malestream work, arguing that
sociological theories, methods and explanations need to be reconceptualised. It is with
developing and illustrating this argument that we are concerned in this book.
Feminism is not a unified movement. While all feminists are agreed that women
are subordinated and that it is necessary to develop strategies to liberate them, there
are fundamental disagreements about the causes of that oppression and the strategies
for achieving liberation. There are even disagreements about what the feminist project
is about and, indeed, what women are (or, as we shall explore throughout the book,
if women as a category even exist). There are a large number of feminisms. In this book
we have tried to describe some of the main theories of relevance to sociology, but this
inevitably means that some feminist theories – such as psychoanalysis and feminist
literary theory – which have made a great contribution to understanding women’s
experiences have been left out.
This problem of distinguishing between different feminist perspectives is not just
an academic one, but also a personal one. We have to try to identify ourselves as well.
In the last edition we described ourselves as Marxist feminists who had evolved into
socialist feminists – feminists who saw class and gender as carrying equal weight in
shaping our experiences of the social world, and also in how we make sense of those
experiences. This affected our interpretation of the material used in the book. We have
since then been influenced by the poststructuralist and postmodernist critique of
modernism and its associated theories – including those of Marxism and socialism. We
have also been influenced by the claim made by Black and post-colonial feminists that
Western feminism has been ethnocentric in its account of women’s lives. Our position
would now be a rather more eclectic one; while still seeing the need to take a funda-
mentally critical perspective on society, on sociology and on the issue of sexual

xiv
 PREFACE

difference (the difference between men and women), we are inclined to work more
from a diversity of theoretical perspectives, arguing that all of them contribute to our
understanding of the social world. Although we are of course aware that some ideas
are incompatible (structural-functionalism and postmodernism, for instance), we would
also argue that it is understanding rather than purity of theory that is of crucial
importance. This book is therefore centrally a contribution to documenting how
feminist sociology can enable us to better understand our lives.
It is important that you, the reader, be aware of our position. We do not feel that
it is possible for us to detach ourselves from our theoretical perspectives and become
neutral reporters of other feminists’ arguments and research findings. It is important
that you are aware that we are not neutral, and that our view is that it is neither possible
nor desirable for anyone to be neutral. This lack of neutrality is especially important
for you, the reader, to keep in mind when we are evaluating the adequacy of work by
other feminists and sociologists.
Whilst feminist perspectives have had a considerable impact on sociology in
recent years, particularly in terms of the sociological consideration of topics such as
the body, sexuality, culture and lifestyle, recent debates in which feminist theory has
been engaged have tended to take place largely at academic conferences or in the
pages of scholarly journals. In this third edition we have aimed to provide a summary
of this recent scholarly activity, by integrating it into a revised and updated version of
the existing framework, hoping that it will be both accessible and stimulating to a
wide audience. Hence, this updated version is intended to be more comprehensive,
not only in its coverage of sociological topics (this edition features two new chapters
on sexuality and media culture) but also in the range of theoretical perspectives
and comparative material included, much of it written by international feminists and
sociologists. But we are also mindful of the extent to which many academics feel it
is undesirable to encourage students at any level to rely solely on a single textbook.
This third edition is thus intended to be more comprehensive and comparative in
its coverage of the feminist contribution to sociology, yet at the same time, seeks
to provide a guiding framework to stimulate and actively encourage further reading
on specific topics in more depth. For this reason, we have also included annotated
suggestions for further reading.
We hope you will enjoy reading the book and will learn from it. We have learned
much from writing it and have enjoyed the process. Feminism and sociology are
not academic subjects that are just to be learned, but ways of coming to understand
the society in which we live and our position in it. We hope that this book will stimulate
you to look at the world afresh and come to new insights.

xv
Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the help that various people including Roger
Sapsford, Philip Hancock, Becky Probert, Laurie Cohen and Amal El-Sawad have
given us in writing the book and in giving us the opportunity to discuss much of the
material presented here. We are also grateful to Moira Taylor, Constance Sutherland
and Adam Gilbert at Taylor & Francis for their assistance in its publication. Special
thanks also go to Julie Collett at Loughborough University for her research assistance,
and for her enthusiasm for the project. We would also like to thank our students at
various universities, who inspired us to write and develop the book and who also
helped with the discussion of its ideas. We alone, of course, remain responsible for the
contents.

xvii
CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: feminism and the sociological

imagination

Setting the agenda

Despite long-standing criticism for its malestream orientation and bias, sociology
remains a relatively male-dominated discipline. This has fundamental implications for
its theories, methods, research and teaching. While the majority of students studying
the subject – as well as an increasing number of lecturers and researchers – are women,
women are found in senior posts less often than men. Female students tend to be
taught ‘malestream’ sociology and so are inducted into knowledge that plays a key
role in justifying the relatively disadvantaged structural position of (the majority of)
women, and in perpetuating the cultural inferiority of femininity. Similarly, what is
perceived as ‘mainstream’ sociological research and theory tends to be that which
male sociologists produce.
However, there has been some progress. Sociologists can no longer afford to
ignore sexual difference (a term used here to refer to the difference between men and
women as social subjects), and there is now some discussion within the discipline
about the changes needed for its malestream bias to be overcome. There is a steady
flow of books, journal articles and conference papers published by women writing
from feminist perspectives in sociology, and most academic social science publishers
have a Feminist, Gender Studies or Women’s Studies list. However, much sociological
research continues to focus on men and boys, and to ignore women and girls or to
incorporate women but without modifying the theories that justified their subordinate
status. There is still a tendency in the social sciences, albeit a declining one, to gen-
eralise from male samples to the whole population, or to overlook the ways in which
sexual difference shapes the social world and our experiences of it, and for textbooks
to ‘add gender in’ as an extra topic or chapter rather than fully incorporating research
findings on women and gender into each substantive area. There is also a tendency
for feminist thought to be seen as an addendum deserving one or two lectures, or
something that can safely be left to women to teach as an optional course, rather than
as a core element of the sociology curriculum.
The relative success of textbooks such as this indicates that there is a demand for
an alternative approach, however; one that places feminist contributions to sociology
at the heart of the discipline. It is now the case that in most Western countries few
courses in sociology could be designed without at least some recognition of feminist
perspectives, while journal articles and research designs are routinely required by their

1
INTRODUCTION

reviewers to problematise sexual difference, or to incorporate a perspective that at

least takes account of the differences between men and women. Indeed, in these
contexts, feminist perspectives are more developed and more influential in sociology
than in most other social science disciplines. So, much progress has been made.
Sociology nevertheless remains a relatively male-dominated academic discipline, and
in many parts of the world a feminist perspective is marginalised, missing from the
agenda completely, ridiculed or even treated with outright hostility.
Even within Western sociology, acceptance of the centrality of feminist per-
spectives has been far from universal. Indeed, a number of malestream responses
to feminist contributions can be discerned involving, at one extreme, ghettoisation
and, at the other, colonisation. By ghettoisation we mean the marginalisation of femi-
nist sociology as something that female lecturers can do or that should be taught
on Women’s Studies courses. While differences between men and women may be
accepted as important, gender is added on as another variable, along with class and
race; the serious challenge posed by feminists to malestream theories is ignored,
distanced or undermined. In the main, men do not teach on these courses – possibly
because they are not seen as prestigious enough or likely to lead to promotion
(Richardson and Robinson, 1994), or because sexual difference, and gender particularly,
continues to be seen as a ‘women’s issue’. The relatively small number of male students
taking courses on feminist theory or gender issues certainly seems testimony to this.
Perhaps the most problematic, enduring and frustrating response feminist approaches
to sociology have been met with in recent years, in this respect, has been one of apathy
from male academics, male students and from female students as well.
At the other extreme, we find what might be regarded as colonisation – the
development of Men’s Studies, and the argument that men need to study men in a way
analogous to the way in which women have claimed the need to study women. Victor
Seidler (1994), for example, has argued that problematising masculinity is central
to the development of social theory. In contrast, Dianne Richardson and Victoria
Robinson (1994) suggest that the development of Men’s Studies may actually enable
men to avoid taking seriously the key issues about masculinity that feminists have
highlighted. They point out that Men’s Studies is concerned mainly with masculine
subjectivity rather than with research that would provide a greater understanding of
how men gain, maintain and use power to subordinate women. Indeed, Men’s Studies
is often conceived largely as a concern with liberating men (Seidler, 1994). As Jalna
Hanmer has suggested,

To conceive of the study of men to be about liberating men is to have little interest
in any area of social analysis that seriously critiques men as men, as part of the
problem, not just to women and each other but to society and our continuation
as a species.
(Hanmer, 1990, p. 29)

A related development in the last fifteen years or so has been the general trend,
in the UK at least, to rename Women’s Studies ‘Gender Studies’ or to develop new
courses entitled Gender Studies instead. Indeed, some publishers have changed the
name of their lists from Women’s Studies to Gender Studies. What is interesting is that

2
 INTRODUCTION

in many cases this has not changed the content of courses; rather the concern has
been to recognise that feminist research and theorising is not just about women and
for women, but must include an analysis of women in relation to men, and that if
women are to be liberated both men and women must change. However, in some
cases this change seemingly involves a failure to recognise the ways in which male-
stream disciplines, including sociology, have been implicated in the subordination
of women. Related to this, the move towards Gender Studies represents what might
be regarded as a de-radicalisation of women’s studies. The danger is that the key
insights and challenges to malestream sociology made by feminists will be diluted.
The central issue for feminists is not that sexual difference divides – that differences
between men and women need to be taken seriously – but that the subordination and
exploitation of women (albeit recognising differences and divisions between women)
needs to be explained. In other words, an awareness needs to be maintained that the
subjectivity of women has to be understood in a structural relationship with men –
a relationship shaped by difference and inequality.
The feminist challenge to malestream sociology is one that requires a radical
rethink of the content and methodology of the whole enterprise; one that recognises
the need not simply to see society from the position of women as well as from the
standpoint of men, but to see the world as fundamentally gendered. Indeed, it is
the feminist challenge to sociology that has been instrumental in triggering the now
almost taken-for-granted understanding that a variety of standpoints – gendered,
racialised, sexualised, embodied, ageing, and so on – need to be recognised, and that
we need not only to deconstruct ‘human’ into men and women, but also to deconstruct
these categories in themselves.
Thus many of the criticisms we have made above apply as much, if not more, to
questions of ethnicity, social class, disability and sexuality. Sociology is a discipline that
has been and continues to be dominated by able-bodied, white males who are middle
class by destination if not necessarily by origin. Women have come into the disci-
pline and challenged the relatively blinkered view of malestream sociology, but they
too have tended to be white, Western and largely middle class. Hence, many white
feminist sociologists have been criticised for their ethnocentric view of gender
relations, and for their failure to take adequate account of diversity amongst men and
women in relation to social class, age, sexuality, disability and global power dynamics.
Yet recognition of the sociological significance of these various forms of social identity,
and crucially of the interrelationships between them, has emerged – we would argue
– partly as a result of the space created by feminist research, theory and politics.
With this in mind, we examine in the various chapters that follow the contribution
that feminists have made and are making to sociology, but aim to do so in a reflexive
and constructive way. We aim to explore the society in which we live from a range of
feminist perspectives. In doing so, we have not aimed to provide an exhaustive
overview of the contributions of female sociologists – recognising, of course, that not
all (pro) feminist sociologists are women and that not all female sociologists are
feminists; nor have we sought to present a comprehensive summary of empirical
research findings. Rather, we have selected material that enables us to demonstrate
the contribution that feminism has made and is making to sociology, and also to
reflect on areas where there is more to be done. We have tried therefore to include

3
INTRODUCTION

comparative material where possible, including some of our own research. In doing
so we recognise that although some issues – such as women’s oppression within the
family – are important global concerns for feminist sociology, such issues are also
contextual. This means that gender issues may well mean something different to
women in different parts of the world, and in different sectors of the same society. In
other words, the lived experience of structural similarities and differences is socially
and culturally specific.
Hence, although domestic violence, for instance, is often triggered by the
perception that a woman has ‘failed’ to fulfil her wifely duties, just what these wifely
duties are can vary considerably throughout the world. In some countries a woman
may be abused because her family has failed to supply a full dowry, whereas in other
societies women are attacked for failing to cook or clean, or manage the housekeep-
ing budget adequately. Many of the issues are the same; they are issues of power and
control, shaped by sexual difference. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union
women were not liberated by their entry into paid employment, although many
Western feminists drawing on a long tradition of liberal humanism had seen this as
the road to independence. Hence, although our focus here, in terms of the research
material we refer to in the book, is primarily on contemporary capitalist societies, we
have attempted to take a broad, comparative and reflexive approach to understand-
ing some of the similarities and differences in women’s experiences and the sense
which sociology might make of them on a global scale, whilst recognising that much
more needs to be done – both politically and academically – in this respect.
As soon as we take the feminist criticisms of malestream sociology seriously we
realise that we need to ask different questions and that in order to answer them we need
to develop new concepts and theories; new ways of looking at and understanding the
world sociologically. This is because the malestream legacy contemporary sociology
has inherited from its ‘founding fathers’ in the main saw women’s roles as natural and
therefore did not investigate or problematise them; sociology was developed to
understand the public world of men and, hence, is often inadequate for investigating
the world that women inhabit and the relationships between men and women.
Questions such as: Why is it usually women who care for young children? Why are
there more male than female political leaders? Why do men rarely wear make-up,
at least in Western societies, whereas women are often expected to do so? become
key issues – sociological problems – requiring investigation and explanation. What
is required, we would argue, is for sociology to be rethought or re-imagined, from a
feminist perspective.

Gendering the sociological imagination

Sociology is about understanding the relationship between our own personal

experiences and the social structures we inhabit (Mills, 1954). However, in the 1960s
and 1970s women began to express the feeling that sociology did not relate to their
experiences, because it examined the world primarily from the perspective of men.
Indeed, existing theories and explanations could be challenged, they argued, if
the perspective of women was taken into account. The realisation of this failure of

4
 INTRODUCTION

sociology to speak to the experiences of women, and its consequent inability to

theorise comprehensively, therefore led feminists to examine more closely why this
was the case; why sociology, despite its claims to neutrality, had a malestream bias.
Sociologist Dorothy Smith (1987) argued that this was because women’s concerns
and experiences were not seen as authentic, but subjective, while men’s were seen as
the basis for the production of ‘true’ knowledge. Consequently, sociological knowledge
portrayed women as men saw them, not as they saw themselves. Sociology also played
a key role in maintaining women’s subordinate and exploited position. While sociology
claimed to put forward a detached and impartial view of reality, in fact it articulated
a view from the perspective of men, so that women became the objects rather than
the subjects of the sociological imagination.
In this respect, it has been argued that women are relegated by sociology and
within a whole range of other academic disciplines to a more ‘natural’ role than men,
one defined by their biology and ‘nature’, while men are seen more in terms of ‘culture’
and ‘civilisation’, resulting in a relationship between ‘cultured man’ and ‘natural
woman’. Following Simone de Beauvoir (1988 [1949]), French feminists in particular
have argued that, in this sense, women constitute the ‘Other’ against which culture,
society, rationality, and so on are constructed. Thus women are seen as gendered but
men are not (hence, sociology books, conferences and courses that focus on gender
are often seen as being primarily for women, and not of interest or direct relevance to
men). Men tend to be regarded as being part of universal rationality – those who
analyse and understand the world from a (social) scientific perspective – and women
are the ones who need explaining or ‘bringing in’. Yet, arguments for the ‘special’
perspective and understanding of women often reinforce this point of view.
Some feminists have argued that women have a unique outlook on the social
world, rooted in the ‘special’ nature of their experiences of the body, and particularly
of motherhood, which are different from those of men. Such feminists have therefore
concurred with other (more conservative) perspectives claiming that differences
between men and women are ultimately rooted in biology. Others argue that such
differences between men and women are largely socially constructed and should be
overcome, or at least their impact on men’s and women’s lives ought to be minimised
(see Chapters 2 and 3).
Our own position is somewhere in between these two extremes, in that we regard
sexual difference as a socio-cultural construction. In our view, biological and physio-
logical differences are often used as the basis for an ideology of sexual difference, one
that serves to ‘justify’ and hence maintain women’s inferior social position. We would
argue that gendering is a process whereby biological differences are used post hoc to
justify subordination and exploitation based on sexual difference, and are not the basis
of the original differentiation. This is not a fixed process but is culturally and socially
variable, so that ideologies of sexual difference need to be subjected to sociological
analysis.

5
INTRODUCTION

Ideologies of sexual difference

Feminists argue that malestream theories fail to meet the criteria for being accepted
as adequate and valid knowledge because they do not take account of men’s and
women’s different experiences of the social world. They in fact serve as an ideological
justification for the subordinate position of women, rather than a critique or an
explanation of it. By ‘ideological’ we mean a pattern of ideas (knowledge that is
regarded as ‘common sense’) – both factual and evaluative – which purports to explain
and legitimate the social structure and culture of a social group or society and which
serves to justify social actions which are in accordance with that pattern of ideas.
Ideology also shapes our everyday feelings, thoughts and actions. However, the
knowledge provided by an ideology is partial or selective and sometimes provides
contradictory descriptions and explanations of the social world. Ideologies, especially
dominant ones, also serve to construct certain aspects of the social world as natural
and universal and therefore unquestionable and unchangeable. Aspects of the social
world that are created as natural and universal by an ideology are thereby protected
from the charge of being socially produced.
There are a number of ideologies of sexual difference that do not necessarily
present consistent accounts but cohere together to form a ‘dominant ideology’. A
dominant ideology is more easily able to present its ideas as natural and universal
because it is produced and reproduced by those in positions of relative power. The
exclusion of women from positions of power and from the production of knowledge
has, feminists argue, meant that patriarchal ideology (male-dominated ideas) has
been able to present itself as universal knowledge. However, feminists have challenged
and continue to challenge patriarchal ideologies – that is, ideas that support male
supremacy – arguing that they are partial and distorting. But because men are in
positions of relative power (in politics or in the mass media, for instance) they are able
to marginalise feminist ideologies.
Ideology as we are using the term, then, is made up of a set of common-sense
beliefs or practical knowledge that form the basis for social action. For example, familial
ideologies in capitalist societies tend to present the nuclear family – of mother, father
and dependent children living as a household, with the man as economic provider and
the woman as the primary carer in the domestic sphere – as a natural (biologically
based) and universal institution. Alternative styles of living are represented as
deviations because they try to change that which is believed to be inevitable. However,
ideologies conceal the fact that they are socially constructed and benefit some groups
more than others. The nuclear family, with a gendered division of labour, serves the
interests of men as well as capitalist development, feminists have argued.
However, ideologies are not all encompassing; they can be opposed by sub-
ordinate social groups and forces and become subject to contestation and change.
Feminists challenge patriarchal ideologies by demonstrating their partial and distorted
view of the world, or by undermining them. Think of internationally renowned pop
star Madonna’s various attempts to parody patriarchal representations of feminine
sexuality as passive and servile, for instance, or of TV character Buffy the Vampire
Slayer’s physical strength and ingenuity. Whether we find these strategies convincing
or not, they are part of the culture of feminist challenges to patriarchal ideology.

6
 INTRODUCTION

Patriarchal ideologies have the effect of disguising the actuality of male power. Men
defined themselves as powerful because of their ability to master nature – to be
dominant. Women, because of their biological role in reproduction, have traditionally
been defined as being closer to nature than men, thus justifying their domination by
men. Male ideology confirms and reinforces men’s dominant status by devaluing
women’s work and reproductive functions while at the same time presenting male
work as of social and economic importance. Masculinity (‘man’) is equated with the
public sphere; to be a man is to be a person who does important things outside of
the domestic sphere.
In some Eastern and Central European countries, women were expected to work
in the public sphere in the same way as men throughout most of the twentieth century.
However, this did not ‘liberate’ them in the way that Marxists and socialists assumed
it would, partly because of the patriarchal division of labour that continued in the home
and also because of patriarchal assumptions that pervaded the workplace and public
life. Therefore it is not simply a question of changing laws and putting women in the
same position as men. What is needed is an understanding of the structures of power
and the way in which the sex/gender system, and ideologies of sexual difference,
forms part of it. This means developing an understanding of the private as well as the
public sphere from a range of feminist perspectives.
Feminists have challenged the notion that biology is destiny, emphasising instead,
as Simone de Beauvoir put it, that ‘one is not born but rather becomes, a woman’
(1988, p. 295). They have argued that biological differences between men and women
do not explain their social roles and that these need to be understood as socially
constructed and in need of sociological explanation. While there may be anatomical
differences between males and females, what is important is the way these differences
are perceived and evaluated, the way boys and girls are socialised into what is seen
as appropriate gender behaviour, and what behaviour is expected and valued. Parents,
teachers and society in general both treat boys and girls differently and have different
expectations as to how they should behave. The expected behaviour of boys and
girls is both encouraged and reinforced by the adults with whom they come into
contact and the institutions of which they are members. Thus television programmes
and school reading schemes both show appropriate role models. Boys and girls who
do not conform to the appropriate role model are both chastised and ridiculed by
adults and by their peers. Boys who display what are seen as feminine traits are referred
to as ‘wimps’, and girls who behave in masculine ways as ‘tomboys’. While some girls
may actually welcome being referred to as tomboys, boys often dislike being called
‘sissies’, which is seen as a term of derision both in terms of gender and sexuality; boys
and young men tend to act to avoid any notion that they have what may be seen as
female traits (see e.g. Willis, 1977).
However, historical and anthropological research suggests that what is seen as
an appropriate role for men and women is specific to particular societies, or social
strata within societies, at particular times (Oakley, 1972). Different societies have
different images of what is appropriate behaviour for males and females, and these
also differ over time. There are important differences in the ways in which gender roles
are defined even within any given society either at different points in history or between
social and ethnic groups. Female sexuality, for example, can be seen as a source of

7
INTRODUCTION

untrammelled libido at one point in time or by one social group, and as completely
missing in other social groups or at other points in time. In the nineteenth century in
Britain and the USA, for example, white women were seen as having no sexual desires
at all, while Black women were seen as uncontrollably promiscuous (see hooks, 1992).
While working-class women were required to work long hours in paid employ-
ment, middle-class women were excluded from paid employment on the grounds of
their ‘biological weakness’. Explanations based on biological differences or biological
factors are therefore unconvincing. It is necessary for sociology to develop theories
that are adequate both for explaining gender divisions and for taking account of gender
differences.

The sex–gender distinction

Largely following Ann Oakley (1972), feminist explanations for inequalities based on
sexual difference have tended to make a distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, one
that parallels a more general sociological separation of the biological from the social;
of ‘nature’ from ‘nurture’. According to this distinction, while ‘sex’ refers to the biological
differences between males and females and provides the (pre-social) basis for gender
socialisation, ‘gender’ refers to the socio-cultural construction of roles appropriate to
men and women, and to the qualities and characteristics ascribed to being masculine
or feminine. To put it simply, biological sex is deemed to be an aspect of identity
a person is born with, whereas (social and cultural) gender is an identity we learn and
acquire through an ongoing (lifelong) process of socialisation. From this perspective,
we are born as human beings (males and females) who become social beings (gendered
subjects) in part through learning and acquiring a (socially acceptable) gender identity.
Feminists such as Oakley have argued that socially acceptable gender roles for
males and females are defined according to patriarchal ideology. In this respect,
the family, peer groups, education, work, religious and cultural beliefs and practices,
and particularly the mass media are all regarded as key agents of gender socialisation.
Hence, feminist approaches to understanding gender roles as shaped by the
‘sex–gender distinction’ tend to emphasise the role of social structures in shaping
gender socialisation and in constraining the identities into which men and women are
socialised.
More recent approaches have tended to emphasise not merely the role of social
structures in constricting men and women into a relatively narrow range of gender
roles, but also their capacity to exercise agency – to challenge and resist gender social-
isation and stereotypes. ‘Agency’ refers to the ability of individuals and groups to
think, speak and act as knowing subjects who are able to engage and interact with the
social world (including social structures) in a purposeful and meaningful way. In short,
an approach that privileges agency highlights the extent to which gender is not simply
something that is ‘done to us’ but rather something that we ‘do’ – an aspect of our
identity and behaviour in which we play an active part. Influenced largely by post-
structuralist and postmodernist perspectives some feminists developing this approach
– one that has come to be known as a ‘doing gender’ perspective – have argued that,
just as ‘gender’ is a social construct, so too is ‘sex’ – in other words, that sex is used as

8
 INTRODUCTION

a justification for the subordination of a group, rather than providing any (pre-social)
basis for social differentiation.
Judith Butler (1990) in particular argued that feminists need to begin to understand
not simply the relationship between sex and gender as one that is shaped by a
distinction between the natural and the social, but rather between sex, gender and
sexuality, and that this relationship is far more complex than a simple nature–nurture
distinction would suggest. Rather than biology (sex) providing the foundation for
socially constructed gender, sexual difference (the differences between men and
women as social subjects shaped by sex, gender and sexuality) ought to be understood
as being shaped according to an ideological framework that Butler (1990) describes
as a ‘heterosexual matrix’. Drawing on de Beauvoir’s (1988, p. 295) earlier contention
that ‘One . . . becomes, a woman’, Butler argues that according to this matrix, males
are socialised as masculine and (hetero)sexually dominant, whereas females are
compelled to become feminine and (hetero)sexually passive. Butler (1993) also con-
tends that according to this ideological framework, biology (in the form of bodies) is
socially constructed in so far as the heterosexual matrix requires men and women
to present and ‘perform’ their bodies in particular (gendered) ways. Hence, ‘feminine’,
(hetero)sexual women are not supposed to develop their muscles, whereas ‘masculine’,
(hetero)sexual men are often not permitted (in the West at least) to wear make-up. In
order to challenge, resist and ultimately undermine the ‘heterosexual matrix’, Butler
(1990) urges men and women to transgress these boundaries and to live outside of
gender by making what she terms ‘gender trouble’.
Postmodernist feminists also emphasise the differences between women, and
resist dividing the world into simplistic categories from which interests are supposed
to derive. Thus simple divisions between ‘black’ and ‘white’ or ‘male’ and ‘female’ are
not sufficient – we need, they argue, to take into account the complex cross-cutting
divisions based upon a variety of identities and differences. This means, however,
as Susan Bordo (1990) argues, that an endless process of fragmentation starts to
take place so that any coherent critique – including a discernibly feminist one – is
impossible. We would agree with this viewpoint and in the chapters that follow attempt
to explore some of the conceptual and theoretical insights of postmodern and
poststructuralist feminist perspectives, whilst remaining committed to the project of
a critical, feminist sociology.

The feminist critique of malestream sociology

Feminists from a range of theoretical perspectives have made a number of criticisms

of malestream sociology. These are based primarily on the view that:

1 sociology has been mainly concerned with research on men, and by implication with
theories and concepts that apply primarily to men’s lives;
2 research findings based on all-male samples are generalised to the whole of the
population;
3 areas and issues of concern to women are frequently overlooked or seen as
unimportant;

9
INTRODUCTION

4 when women are included in research they are often presented in a distorted and
stereotypical way;
5 when sex and gender are included in research they have tended to be just ‘added
on’, ignoring the extent to which the explanatory theories used are ones which have
justified the subordination and exploitation of women.

In summary, this means that there is at best no recognition that women’s structural
position and consequent experiences are not the same as men’s and that sexual
difference is therefore an important explanatory variable; at worst women’s experi-
ences are deliberately ignored or distorted. Furthermore, the ways in which men
dominate and subordinate women are either ignored or seen as natural. Ann Oakley
(1982) has suggested that there are three explanations for this. These are that:

1 sociology has been biased from its origin;

2 sociology is predominantly a male profession; and
3 ideologies of sexual difference result in the world being constructed in particular
ways and in assumptions being made about how we explain differences between
men and women.

It is evident that these three factors are interrelated. Sexist assumptions were built into
sociology from its origins and in many ways these still underline sociological theory
and research. Sociology as a discipline developed in the nineteenth century, and early
or ‘classical’ sociologists were primarily concerned with understanding political and
economic changes relating to the development of industrial capitalism. These changes
included the growth of factory production, new class divisions and relationships, the
growth of a politically conscious (male) working class and the extension of political
participation to more of the adult (male) population. A central aspect of this process
for women was the increased separation of home from work, the separation of
production from consumption and reproduction, and the development of an ideology
that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’. Women became increasingly associated with
the domestic (private) sphere of the home and with domestic relationships, and men
with the public sphere of politics and the marketplace.
Most sociologists concentrated on the public sphere of government and the
workplace and ignored the private sphere of the home and domestic relationships (see
Engels, 1972 [1884] for a notable exception). This was at least in part because the
division of labour between the public sphere (men) and the private sphere (women)
was seen as natural – that is, as having a biological, essential basis. The biologist
Charles Darwin indicated that

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man
attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain
– whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or . . . the use of the
senses and the hands.
(Darwin, 1871)

This meant that there was no reason for sociology to explain sexual difference; it
accepted biology as a pre-social given and therefore had no need to consider gender

10
 INTRODUCTION

as an explanatory variable or to theorise the subordination and exploitation of women.

Women were consequently ‘hidden’ from the sociological gaze, both theoretically and
empirically.
Sociology has tended to ignore not just women, but the whole private sphere of
domestic relationships; areas of interest to women were not theorised and researched
in any sustained way until relatively recently. This means that sociology has failed
to develop analytical tools that can be used to understand the public and the private
sphere and the changing relationships between the two. While men have been seen
as inhabiting both spheres and indeed as mediating between the two, women have
tended until relatively recently to be seen primarily as inhabiting the private sphere,
even when they have paid employment outside of the home. Consequently, expla-
nations for men’s attitudes and behaviour are generally based on their position in
the public world (largely with reference to social class), while women’s are explained
largely by reference to their role in the private sphere as wives and mothers.

Towards a feminist sociology

The feminist challenge has meant that in many countries across the world, women’s
perspectives are seen as more important now than in the past. Sara Delamont (2003)
points out that opening up new topics, as well as creating new intellectual spaces and
definitions of ‘knowledge’, has been one of the main achievements of feminist
sociology. We can identify some areas of sociology that have been reconstructed as
a result of feminist contributions, some areas where there has been some impact, and
some areas where feminist ideas have yet to be recognised:

1 Areas of sociology which have been revived or reconstructed from feminist perspectives:
sexuality and the body; identity and difference; visual and cultural sociology.
2 Areas of sociology where feminist perspectives have made a significant impact: health and
illness; the family and domestic labour; work, employment and organisation;
education; crime and deviance; age and the life course; mass media and popular
culture.
3 Areas of sociology where feminist perspectives have not in the main been incorporated:
social class and stratification; political sociology; social and sociological theory.

Feminists are not agreed on what is required to fill the gaps in existing theory and
research in sociology. We would suggest that there have been three broad responses:

1 integration
2 separatism
3 reconceptualisation.

We will deal with each of these in turn.

11
INTRODUCTION

Integration

This position sees the main problem as being the sexist bias in malestream sociology.
The task is seen as being to remove this bias by reforming existing ideas and practices
in sociology, to bring women in (by providing courses or module options on the
sociology of gender, or on ‘gender issues’, for instance) and thereby to fill in the existing
gaps in our knowledge. The way forward is to carry out research that incorporates
women in samples and to reform existing theories.
The major problem with this approach is that women are likely to continue to be
marginalised. They will become merely an addition to the syllabus (‘gender issues’ is
often regarded as ‘women’s issues’, for instance, and frequently opted for only or
primarily by female students) and lip-service will be paid to incorporating women into
research samples. Moreover, it leaves the basis of the discipline untouched; it fails to
challenge the assumption that the discipline is (or should strive to be) scientific, and
does not take into account feminist criteria on what counts as knowledge. For example,
this approach would leave unchallenged malestream assumptions about the division
between the public and the private, about the primacy of paid work, about class being
the fundamental division in society, and so on. Possibly most serious of all, it fails to
recognise that gender is not just a variable of differentiation, but that men subordinate
and exploit women and that sociology as a discipline has played a role in justifying that
exploitation and in perpetuating gender ideology.

Separatism

This position – associated largely with women’s studies – argues that what is needed
is what Dorothy Smith (1987) described as a sociology for women by women. Feminists
should not be concerned with trying to change the biases of existing sociology, but with
developing a sociological knowledge which is specifically by and about women.
Explicit recognition is given to the fact that the world is always seen from a particular
position or site and that women’s perceptions are different from men’s. Furthermore,
gender – or rather sexual difference – is seen as the primary division in society; all
women are seen to share a common position because they are both exploited and
dominated by men. Feminist scholarship should be concerned with developing
theories and carrying out research on women that is of benefit to women. The strength
of this approach, apart from its gynocentrism (or woman-centredness), is that it tends
to be very multi- or even trans-disciplinary in its approach, drawing on feminist
contributions in psychology, literary theory, history, media and cultural studies, and
so on.
Its main problem, however, is that it tends to perpetuate the marginality of women.
Rather than trying to overcomes women’s marginalisation and exclusion from the
discipline (and from the academy generally), a separatist approach tends to celebrate
it. This means that malestream sociology is left to get on with the ‘real’ theorising
and research and continue to ignore women and feminist perspectives. Furthermore,
by ignoring men, important aspects of women’s social reality continue to be ignored,
including the ways in which men exploit, dominate and subordinate women in the

12
 INTRODUCTION

public and the private spheres. Any analysis of women’s oppression must reflect on –
and attempt to challenge and resist – the role played in this by men and men’s interests.

Reconceptualisation

This position also recognises the need for sociological research by women and for
women, and the notion that women have different points of view from men, but also
emphasises that it is essential that sociology is reconstructed to take account of men’s
and women’s different experiences and of feminist perspectives. It recognises that it
is necessary for women to carry out research on men and boys as well as women and
girls and acknowledges that malestream sociological theories and research findings
can have an impact on feminist sociology as well as vice versa.
However, it rejects the view that all that is needed is to integrate feminist sociology
into existing sociological theory and research findings – that is, as it were, to fill in the
gaps in our knowledge and to tinker with the edges of existing theories. Instead, it is
seen as necessary to reconceptualise sociological theories; a total rethinking, rather
than partial reform, is necessary. This is both because existing theories are sexist
beyond reform by mere tinkering, and because feminist research actually challenges
assumptions and generalisations made on the basis of malestream research. Feminist
sociologists, for instance, have highlighted that Giddens’s (1991, p. 219) understand-
ing of the body as an integral element of the ‘reflexive project of the self’ seriously
underestimates the extent to which women’s bodies as projects continue to be more
reflective of partriarchal norms and values than reflexive expressions of a self-
determined individuality (Tyler and Abbott, 1998, p. 437). Similarly, the revised edition
of Daniel Bell’s (1999) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society includes merely ‘a note on
women’ in the foreword, rather than a reassessment of the post-industrial thesis that
takes account of sexual difference.
What is needed is a total and radical reformulation of sociology so that it is able
to incorporate women adequately. In this sense, a feminist reconceptualisation of
sociology urges us to think critically and reflexively about our assumptions about
the nature of the social world, about the methods and methodologies we devise to
understand that world, about the concepts and theories we draw upon, and about
the perspectives we adopt in order to justify our knowledge and what we claim to
be ‘true’. Many feminists would argue that despite ongoing debates and criticisms,
malestream sociology has tended to take the latter more seriously than the feminist
contribution.
The major problem with this approach is that many malestream sociologists
are resistant to the view that there is a need for a feminist reconceptualisation.
Nevertheless, this is the position that we (the authors) advocate and have sought to
pursue in our own work, and while we recognise that this is an uphill struggle we think
that it is a necessary one if sociology as a discipline is to continue to provide any
meaningful critique of the social world.

13
INTRODUCTION

Conclusions

In this chapter we have argued that it is necessary for there to be a sociology from
the position of women and that if this is to become an integral part of sociology
then sociology itself needs to be reconceptualised. ‘Filling in the gaps’ by carrying out
research on women and tinkering with existing theories is not sufficient. Looking at the
world from a range of feminist perspectives means that we need to rethink sociology
and to challenge existing theories and research findings. In the rest of this book we
substantiate this, not only by explaining what feminist sociologists have found out but
also by demonstrating how this requires a rethinking of existing sociological
assumptions, methods, concepts and theories.
Finally, we want to point out that we have subtitled this book ‘feminist per-
spectives’, not ‘the feminist perspective’ or even ‘a feminist perspective’. This is because
there are a number of feminist perspectives considered here, not just one. In male-
stream sociology there are an increasingly complex range of competing theoretical
approaches – Marxist, Weberian, symbolic interactionist, ethnomethodological,
structural-functionalist and postmodernist, to name but a few of those most frequently
encountered. Feminist sociologists are also divided among these schools of thought;
what feminists have in common is a commitment to looking at the social world through
the lens of sexual difference. We go on to examine the main feminist perspectives in
the next chapter.

SUMMARY

What is needed is sociological theory and practice that recognises:

1 the importance of sexual difference (sex, gender and sexuality) as well
as class, ‘race’, age, disability and other forms of differentiation;
2 that the world needs to be understood as being shaped by these forms
of differentiation;
3 that social spheres such as the public and the private are not separate
worlds, but have been socially (economically) structured as such.
Instead, they are areas of mutual influence, and the relationship
between the two changes and needs explaining; and
4 the existing assumptions, concepts and theories of sociology need to
be reconsidered.

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 INTRODUCTION

FURTHER READING

Beasley, C. (1999) What is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory. London: Sage. This
introductory text outlines in a highly accessible way the complex and often conflicting ideas
shaping contemporary feminism. Overall, it is a clear and concise guide to contemporary
feminist ideas. Its main weakness is perhaps its brevity – it is very much an introductory outline.
But in this sense, it provides a sound basis on which to explore the ideas introduced in more depth
elsewhere.
Delamont, S. (2003) Feminist Sociology. London: Sage. This book is a lively and engaging
exploration of the achievements of feminist sociology in theory, methods and empirical research.
One of its main strengths is its consideration of the work of the ‘founding mothers’ of sociology,
as well as the contemporary opportunities and challenges posed by postmodernism. Its focus
is primarily Anglo-American, however.
Freedman, J. (2001) Feminism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. This short book provides
a comprehensive introduction to some of the major debates within contemporary feminism,
focusing on the equality versus difference debate and considering a range of feminist
perspectives.
Macionis, J. and Plummer, K. (2002) Sociology: A Global Introduction. Second edition. London:
Prentice Hall. This is a comprehensive and engaging mainstream sociology text which takes a
global perspective, and which also incorporates a consideration of feminist contributions and
issues of sexual difference into every chapter.
Mills, C. Wright (1954) The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin. This book is a
sociological classic and is an excellent introduction to the idea of thinking sociologically, and
to the concept of the sociological imagination – a way of thinking about the social world that
links individual, personal experience to its broader social context, and vice versa.

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 CHAPTER TWO

Feminist sociological theory

A feminist sociology is one that is not just or necessarily about women but one that
challenges and confronts the male supremacy that institutionalises women’s inequality.
The defining characteristic of feminism is the view that women’s relative subordination
must be questioned and challenged. This involves:

• feminist research (that attempts to document and describe the main social differences
and inequalities between men and women);
• feminist theory (that attempts to explain and account for these differences and
inequalities);
• feminist politics (that attempts to challenge and resist inequalities between men
and women).

Throughout this book, we are concerned with each of these aspects of feminism but
in this chapter particularly, our focus is on feminist theory.
Feminism proceeds from the view that women are oppressed and that for many
women this oppression is primary, whereas for others it is part of a multiplicity of
oppression. Women’s freedom of action and expression is limited by the relative power
of men – because men, in the main, tend to possess more economic, cultural and
social resources than women. This is not to ignore the fact that there are differences
between women and between men, and indeed that these differences themselves
involve subordination and exploitation. Nor is it to suggest that differences are additive;
we recognise, for example, that race and gender articulate to produce a unique sub-
jectivity for Black women rather than simply ‘layers’ of oppression (see hooks, 1982).
Nonetheless we would point out that the traditional emphasis in sociology on the
state, economy and other public institutions as the main sources of oppression tend
to ignore power inequalities in ‘private’ institutions such as the family and in personal
relationships in both the public and the private sphere. Feminists have argued that
‘the personal is political’ – that is, that it is active agents who ‘do the oppressing’ and
that it is necessary to give credence to women’s concrete experiences of oppression
– ones occurring in personal, everyday encounters – as well as those at the collective
and institutional level. Feminist sociologists, then, are concerned to examine the
relationship between individuals and the social structure, between women’s everyday
experiences and the structure of the society in which we live, between men’s relative
power in interpersonal relationships and the ways in which that power is institution-

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 FEMINIST SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

alised in a range of societies. Feminist sociologists are also concerned to understand

the ways in which relationships between men and women, and between men and
between women, are changing, and to reflect on the causes and consequences of some
of these changes.

Feminist perspectives and sociology

In order to understand why sociology needs feminism it is necessary to understand

what sociology is trying to do as a discipline. It is concerned with providing an under-
standing of the social; to enable us to understand the social world we inhabit, and
our position within it – to develop and deploy the sociological imagination (see Chapter
1). Feminist sociological theory has pre-eminently been concerned with enabling
women (and men) to understand the subordination and exploitation of women. Without
taking account of the criticisms that feminists have made of traditional sociological
theory and reformulating these theories to take account of feminist perspectives,
sociology will continue to produce only limited accounts of the social world which,
feminists have argued, are complicit in the subordination of women.
As feminists and sociologists we want a reformulated sociology, one infused
by feminist ideas. However, one of the areas of sociology that has been most resistant
to change has been theory – traditionally seen as a male preserve. Before we consider
feminist theories and the ways they enable us to think about the social world as a whole
(rather than just women’s experiences of it), we want to consider what sociological
theory is and what it means to ‘think sociologically’. Theory is the basis not just of
sociology, but of social science more generally. Theories shape the ways in which
we make sense of the world – the questions we ask and the range of answers that we
are prepared to accept. As John Scott (1995, p. xii) has pointed out, ‘sociology is a
theoretical enterprise’ – it is about making sense of the world in which we live – yet,
as we pointed out in Chapter 1, it is not just that the discipline has ignored sexual
difference (the difference between men and women as social subjects), but rather
that it has been complicit in justifying subordination and exploitation based on these
differences. Theory is also the area that has been slowest to change – to take the
feminist critique seriously.
While empirical sociology has by and large begun to recognise the need to
incorporate differences between men and women into research designs, malestream
theorists tend to remain relatively silent on sexual difference and on the contribution
of feminist thought to sociology and social theory more generally. Rob Stones’s (1998)
Key Sociological Thinkers includes only three chapters (out of 21) on female (in this
case, feminist) theorists, and only three chapters written by women. A similar text,
Profiles in Contemporary Social Theory (Elliott and Turner, 2001) includes only five
chapters (out of 34) on female theorists, and only nine chapters written by women.
These omissions not only marginalise and devalue the contribution that female
sociologists (both feminist and non-feminist) have made to sociological theory, they
also perpetuate the myth that theory is ‘difficult’, and is something that only men can
do well. They also reinforce the view that theory is an account of the thoughts of great
men rather than an attempt to develop ideas that enable us to understand and influence

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FEMINIST SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

the world in which we live. Furthermore, it demonstrates that male sociological

theorists have not recognised the need to reformulate theory to take account of the
critique made by feminist sociologists. It is in the area of theory, then, that we can
perhaps see the greatest resistance within sociology to the challenge made by feminists
to the phallocentrism (male centredness) of the discipline. However, as feminists,
we remain committed to the development of a reformulated sociology that is able to
theorise the social world adequately, for women as well as for men.

An invitation to feminist sociology

When we (the authors) first started sociology, we each of us found that we did not
really understand what we were supposed to be learning, but we also felt that what
we were doing was not just interesting but exciting. We were being asked to look at,
make sense of, and ask questions about the society in which we lived, in ways that
had not necessarily occurred to us before, and we found the tentative answers put
forward by sociologists challenging – they made us think about society and social
relations in new ways and provided a much clearer and much more interesting
set of answers than we had come across before. We were being invited to grasp
what Charles Wright Mills (1954) called ‘the sociological imagination’ (see Chapter 1).
It was not easy to come to understand how to think sociologically, and indeed
each of us is still learning, but we certainly came to a new perspective, a new way of
thinking and, equally importantly, we began to ask ‘new’ questions about the social
world.
Our concern in this chapter particularly, but in the book as a whole, is to explore
what it means to ‘think sociologically’ from a range of feminist perspectives. In Chapter
13 we shall look at questions relating to the status of feminist knowledge, but the
focus of this chapter is on the plurality of feminist perspectives – frameworks for
understanding and making sense of social relations, which is the subject matter of
sociology.
Sociology is of interest to us all because it is about subjects that concern us all in
our everyday lives: media culture, crime, families, work, education, race relations,
class, gender, political behaviour, and so on. These are issues of general concern, the
frequent topics of newspaper articles and news broadcasts, the subjects of novels and
plays. Sociologists, including feminist sociologists, explore these issues and try to
provide answers to the kinds of questions we commonly ask, for example: How do
images of ‘perfect bodies’ in the mass media – in advertising or in films, for instance
– affect us? Why do some people commit crimes and not others? Why does getting
married continue to be so popular, even in societies in which divorce is relatively
common? Why do people do the jobs they do? Why do some people become political
leaders and not others? We also ask these questions in relation to our own lives: Why
do I feel conscious about my body size and shape? Why didn’t I get that job? However,
the questions feminist sociologists ask often take a different slant: Why are women
more likely than men to develop an eating disorder? Why do so few women commit
crime? Why do more women than men tend to experience poverty on divorce? Why
are most secretaries women, most engineers men? Why are relatively few women
involved in politics?

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 FEMINIST SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

When we answer these questions we do not just look at ‘the facts’; mere
description can only tell us that something is the case, not why it is the case. When we
try to say ‘why’, we are going beyond the facts; we are trying to explain them. Doing
this, we are using and developing theories. In explaining to ourselves what is going on
in our lives we often use ‘common sense’; we justify our answers by saying that ‘it
stands to reason’, or ‘it is common sense’ and ‘everyone knows that’. We do not ask
ourselves what our theory is and where it comes from, nor do we try to refute our own
conclusions. Common-sense theories frequently ‘blame the victim’ – divorced women
are living in poverty because they would rather live on state benefits than take a job;
women make good secretaries because they have nimble fingers, and are naturally
more obedient and diligent than men; women don’t become political leaders because
they are too ‘soft’ and not rational or competitive enough to cope with the respon-
sibility. Of course, sociologists share some of these common-sense views – they are
members of society whose experiences and expectations shape their own beliefs – but
they try to go beyond them, to draw on their sociological knowledge and research to
construct theories which provide a more sophisticated understanding of the social
world as a complex totality, and which are not based merely on taken-for-granted
assumptions and values, but instead seek to challenge them.

The insights of sociology

As feminist sociologists we do not want to reject sociology and the insights it provides
us with; what we want to do is develop a feminist sociology. What defines sociology
is not what it studies but how: the sociological perspective is a distinctive way of look-
ing at the social world. It is concerned with the patterned regularities in social life
and rejects the view that these can be explained adequately by reference to the biology
or psychology of individuals. This is not to say that biological or psychological
explanations are wrong, but that on their own they are inadequate. It is not possible,
sociologists argue, to understand the social purely by reference to characteristics that
are presumed to be inherent (pre-social) in the individual, nor by reference to the
psychological qualities of individuals. Yet this is how we often explain things to
ourselves. We perceive that it is ‘natural’ to grow up and fall in love, for example. In
Western cultures, we grow up to assume that we will marry the person we fall in love
with, or at least make them our long-term partner, whereas in communities in which
arranged marriages are more common, the ‘natural’ assumption is that we will grow
to love and respect the person we marry, or that marriage and love are separate but
somewhat inevitable aspects of adult life. These assumptions, that we learn and acquire
through processes of socialisation, mean that we come to perceive non-married adults
– particularly women, for whom marriage and the family are often seen as the primary
role – as having somehow ‘failed’ or deviated in this respect.
Sociologists challenge these seemingly common-sense assumptions about what
is ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ as explanations and argue that they are inadequate because
they do not take into account the ways in which the structures of society and our social
interactions with others influence and shape us. Sociologists point out that we need
to question these taken-for-granted explanations and then construct more adequate

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explanations – theories that help us to understand and make sense of what is going
on, to look beneath the surface, to be sceptical and to have a questioning mind. What
is necessary is to develop feminist sociological perspectives that enable women to
become fully integrated into sociological understanding.
Once particular explanations have begun to dominate theoretical debates, other
perspectives tend to challenge them and formulate alternative ideas, and so new
theories evolve and begin to establish themselves. Hence, new ways of understanding
and explaining the world tend to emerge from a critique of existing ideas. In this sense,
sociological theory is always provisional and partial, because theory is never ‘perfect’
or ‘total’, and because the social world is constantly changing – if we had complete
understanding we would have no more need for sociology. In the same way, if we
knew the truth about everything in the natural world we would have no more need
for biology or physics or chemistry, but we know that this isn’t possible because, like
the social world, the natural world is complex and constantly changing. We would
suggest that while many substantive areas in sociology have recognised the need to
take feminist critiques seriously, there has not been the same awareness of a need
to reformulate sociological theory in the same way. Feminist theory has been seen
as concerned with explaining the specific position of women, rather than as meta- or
mainstream sociological theory. We would argue that it is much more than this, even
if the position of women has been a central concern. Once the feminist critique of
conventional sociology is taken seriously, and feminist theories are given careful
consideration, it becomes evident that sociological theory as a whole needs to be
reformulated.
In his book The Sociological Imagination C. Wright Mills (1954) provides one of
the best accounts of what it is to grasp the sociological imagination, the relationship
between biography and history, and to recognise the inadequacy of individualistic
explanations. The sociological imagination should enable us to grasp that personal
troubles are frequently social ills, that what we perceive as social problems can only
be understood and explained fully when we examine social, political and economic
factors – when we look for social explanations. Think, for instance, of women’s position
in the labour market and the systematic way in which women are concentrated in jobs
that have a lower status and lower remuneration than men (see Chapter 9). This cannot
be explained simply by reference to the characteristics of individual women; we have
to consider structural factors that shape women’s experiences. In this respect, we
have to consider the relationship between structure (the constellation of social institu-
tions, organisations and practices that shape our behaviour) and agency (the capacity
of individuals to act) in shaping our experiences of, and positions within, the social
world. Many women might choose to work part-time, for instance (and hence exercise
agency), but they exercise that ‘choice’ within the context of structural constraints (a
relative lack of availability of state-provided or funded childcare, inflexible working
arrangements, ideologies of gender and so on).
Sociology, then, is about understanding the relationship between our own
experiences and the social structures we inhabit. Students are often resistant to
sociology because they feel that it denies that they and other people have ‘free will’
– that it takes away from people the responsibility for their actions and suggests that
we are totally constrained by factors over which we have no control. Sociology is not

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the only subject in danger of reductionism and determinism; biological and psycho-
logical explanations can be equally reductionist. Biology and psychology tend to blame
the ‘victim’s’ biology (genetic make-up) or psychological constitution for social or
psychological ‘problems’ (phenomena in need of explanation); sociologists tend to
shift the blame to outside the individual, to external factors (as indeed do some
psychological perspectives – behaviourism, for instance).
Thus there is a tension between acknowledging the power of social structures, and
giving due allowance to individual variation in human behaviour. To grasp the full
complexity of individual social behaviour and to discover the underlying patterns
of similarity which may link them together requires a theory that can explain how
the moral imperatives of ‘society’ are translated into the norms and standards that
form the guidelines for people’s lives. We are socially determined and yet determining;
we are acted on and yet we act. This tension between agency (underpinning life
choices) and structure (shaping life chances) is one of the issues that distinguishes
different sociological and indeed feminist perspectives; some give more weight to
structures emphasising the constraining effects of social structures on individuals and
groups, and others give more weight to agency, stressing the ways in which we act on
the world and in the process have the capacity to change it. Others have developed
theories that attempt specifically to understand the relationship between these two
aspects or dimensions of the social world, describing the dynamic relationship between
structure and agency in terms of ‘structuration’ (see Giddens, 1991).

The historical context of sociology

To understand fully the sociological imagination and the contemporary theoretical

debates in sociology and feminism, it is necessary to understand the historical devel-
opment of sociology as a discipline. Although men and women have always asked
questions about, and tried to understand and explain, society and social relations,
sociology as a distinct discipline developed only in any coherent and purposeful way
in the nineteenth century. It arose during a particular intellectual and social period
in the history of European societies that has subsequently come to be known as
‘modernity’. The changes that took place in European societies during the course of
the nineteenth century, and which have since become more global, resulted in the
social transformation of those societies. Three specific developments are crucial:

1 the scientific revolution which started in the sixteenth century;

2 the development of Enlightenment thought during the eighteenth century, culminating
in the French Revolution; and
3 the industrial revolution which started in the late eighteenth century in England, and
which provided the foundation for the development of modern capitalism.

Sociology is seen as a reaction to each of these developments, but also as a

fundamental contributor to the ongoing social, economic, political and intellectual
movements that developed as a result. In essence, sociology as an intellectual project
– that is, as a set of concepts and ideas that sought to make sense of the ascendancy

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of science, the impact of the European Enlightenment and the development of

capitalism – can be understood as part of a body of ideas that are thought of as
‘modernist’. Modernist thought rejects religious doctrine as the guarantor of truth and
replaces it with a commitment to rationality, reason and science – values that under-
pinned early (nineteenth-century, or post-Enlightenment) forms of sociology.
The scientific revolution made possible an unprecedented understanding and
control of the natural world. Sociologists thought that the methodology of the natural
sciences would make it possible to understand and control the social world also.
Enlightenment thought led to the dominance of ideas of progress and of liberty and
individualism. As well as the scientific method, sociologists took on the idea of progress
but reacted against the emphasis on individualism, stressing the importance of the
collectivity and the interrelationship and interdependence of members of society.
The industrial revolution and the development and growth of industrial capitalism
resulted in dramatic social and economic changes stemming largely from the
separation of work and home (the public and the private) – urbanisation, new class
relationships, paid employment, the economic dependence of women and children,
and so on. Sociologists wanted to understand and explain these changes. In doing
so, they also suggested ways in which societies could be reformed and the whole
modernisation process could be ‘mastered’.
Some sociologists and feminists argue that the late twentieth century witnessed
a further transformation, into a ‘post-modern’ society, and that new postmodern
theories, are necessary to make sense of what is happening as a result. The post-
modern condition is seen as arising from a variety of social and cultural changes that
took place in the latter part of the twentieth century – rapid technological change,
shifting political concerns, globalisation, the creation of a knowledge society, and
the rise of new social movements, for instance. Postmodernism rejects the ideas of the
Enlightenment, of progress, of scientific truth and the possibility of universal, totalis-
ing theories (or ‘metanarratives’ – Lyotard, 1984) – theories such as Marxism which
claim to explain everything and to have the sole explanation, often with reference to
one particular determining factor, capitalism. Instead, postmodern theorists argue that
there are no metanarratives, no notions of progress and no single history – there are
different histories and multiple truths, rather than one foundational, universal truth.
Many different and equally authoritative voices and orientations are possible in the
post-modern world. Postmodernism therefore questions the foundationalism and
absolutism of modernism – it challenges both positivistic and humanistic approaches
to social science. Postmodernism rejects the declaration of difference between natural
and social sciences – even Marxism, postmodernists point out, did not challenge the
status of scientific knowledge but argued that social-scientific knowledge was equally
as good as natural science, but different.
Feminists, too, have questioned many of the epistemological foundations of
Western thought and argued that modernist knowledge, in the name of objectivity
and truth, has subordinated and subjugated women. Some feminists have argued that
feminism and postmodernism are therefore natural allies, as both have been critical
of modernist thought – and there are a substantial number of feminists who identify
themselves as postmodernist accordingly. However, others have indicated that total
relativism and the abandonment of theory are as problematic for feminism as for

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sociology. Postmodernism, in their perception, challenges the very enterprise of both

sociology and feminism – which is not just understanding what is going on but changing
the social world, achieving progress by acting on the world on the basis of a ‘truth’
position.

Theory and theorising

In some ways, we are all theorists. Everybody thinks, everybody has ideas – not just
experts and intellectuals. We all analyse and interpret in order to make sense of what
is going on around us. Theories are how we try to explain, and make sense of, the
social world. What is the difference, then, between our everyday, common-sense
theories and sociological theory? Broadly speaking, in social science we tend to call
an explanation a ‘theory’ if it is open-ended, open to new evidence, capable of modi-
fication and improvement, and clear about the way its concepts are formed. However,
there is no absolute distinction in social science between science (knowledge based
on disinterested explanation) and ideology (knowledge which reflects particular
interests). Marxism, for instance, is both a theory and an ideology in so far as it tries
to explain how society works, but also provides a guide for action. The same point
applies to feminism and many of the others ‘isms’ within sociology.
All sociologists try to think theoretically, and social or sociological theories
(including feminist ones) can be distinguished from our common-sense, everyday
understandings and explanations in the following ways:

1 theory attempts to be systematic about explanations and ideas – it attempts to be

internally logical and coherent;
2 it attempts to provide adequate explanations – that is, it tries to take account of
competing explanations, different viewpoints, and so on and to locate particular
phenomena within a totality – to see ‘the whole picture’;
3 it is open to refutation and critique.

A theoretical perspective is a lens through which the social world is ‘seen’, one that
makes theorising (explaining and making sense of what is going on) possible. A
theoretical perspective helps us to ask questions and to think about what we might need
to answer those questions, directs us to the material (‘evidence’) we need and suggests
how best to interpret and explain things. Sociology is always theoretical and sociol-
ogists adopt different theoretical perspectives.
From a narrow scientific view, a theory is a series of properties that describes a
set of observations. Theories summarise and organise what we know about the world.
A theoretical perspective, however,

1 suggests the types of question we should be asking and draws our attention to certain
kinds of events rather than others (those we define as ‘problems’ – phenomena in
need of explanation) – e.g. feminist sociologists ask the question ‘Why do women
tend to do more housework than men?’;
2 provides us with the concepts to use in our analysis and accounts of our observations
of social life – e.g. gender ideology, division of labour;

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3 provides us with ways of answering questions in the form of orienting assumptions and
guides to observation – e.g. feminist sociologists assume that the gendered division
of labour is something that needs to be explained;
4 helps us to interpret what we observe – theory structures the process of perception
– e.g. feminist sociologists explain the gendered division of labour as the outcome
of patriarchal and/or capitalist processes;
5 involves value judgements about what social scientific knowledge is for and how it
is to be applied to social life.

Thus sociological (and feminist) theories provide answers to ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions
but they do not necessarily agree on the answers to these questions, or even what the
questions themselves should be. Just as we can disagree on how something is to be
explained in our day-to-day lives, so sociologists (and feminists) disagree when they
are explaining the same thing. This is because ‘facts do not speak for themselves’;
they have to be explained, and it is theory that enables us to understand them.
Furthermore, what the facts are is not always self-evident. Take, for example,
the question, ‘What counts as crime?’: this might seem self-evident at first, but on closer
examination we realise that it is not. For example, is ‘crime’ all behaviour that breaks
the law, or is it only that behaviour which is labelled as ‘criminal’ – and, if so, by whom?
Even when the facts are straightforward, no amount of observation and data-gathering
will explain them. For example, in Britain statistics on birth are probably almost totally
reliable. It is very difficult not to register the birth of a baby. However, no amount
of collecting and dissecting birth statistics will lead to an explanation of fluctuations
in the birth rate. Description alone will explain neither the fluctuation or how it relates
to other events and processes – e.g. the economic situation, the proportion of the
population marrying, the infant mortality rate, and so on.
Sociologists (and feminists), then, develop theories that enable them to make
sense of the social. Theories make sense of the facts – they interpret them for us. In
sociology, theories are used to provide arguments about how society should be viewed
and how the ‘facts’ should be apprehended and ordered. Facts alone cannot resolve
theoretical disputes, because theories are explanations of the facts. Even when there
is agreement as to what the facts are, they can be used to support different theories;
two theories may be incompatible with each other and yet agree on what the available
facts are.
Theories, then, direct us to what evidence to look for and then enable us to make
sense of the facts that we have collected. This does not mean that facts and factual
knowledge are not important for sociological understanding. It is important that
sociological and feminist theories are open to refutation – that facts can refute our
theories – and that theories take the facts fully into account. There is a complex rela-
tionship between fact and theory and disagreement over what is to count as a ‘fact’,
as valid evidence or data. Theories guide us as to what counts as evidence. When we
describe the relationship between two events as causal we are making a theoretical
statement, not a factual one; we are explaining and interpreting, not describing.
Sociological and feminist theories are attempts to explain social life, and they
comprise sets of logically connected ideas that can describe and explain social reality
and be validated/refuted by evidence. Each of these approaches answers the questions

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(1) ‘What is the nature of social reality?’ (answers to this question are what we call
‘ontologies’ – theories of existence or being) and (2) ‘How can we know about it?’
(answers to this question are what we call ‘epistemologies’ – theories of knowledge,
see Chapter 13). When social scientists develop theories, their epistemology or theory
of knowledge is often determined by the ontological position they take; that is, their
understanding of the nature of reality. Broadly speaking, four ontological perspectives
can be discerned within sociology. These are:

1 positivist
2 idealist
3 realist, and
4 postmodernist.

Positivism

A positivist approach sees continuity between the natural and social sciences, with
society existing as an analytic reality. Social structures and social processes are seen
as comparable to those of the natural world and can be studied by the same methods
and according to the same values as are used in the natural sciences. The sociologist’s
task is to collect empirical evidence – social facts – and on the basis of this to explain
and predict the social world. Sociologists construct theories that comprise general
statements about relationships existing in the (real) social world. A positivist approach
therefore emphasises that the sociologist should study the social world in much the
same way as a geologist might examine rock formations, or a chemist might study
chemical reactions – as neutral, impartial observers. For a positivist, then, values such
as objectivity, reliability and validity are seen as crucial in making convincing claims
to scientific knowledge.

Idealism

The idealist approach sees social life as the product of human consciousness
(subjectivity) – of the meaning that human beings give to their conduct rather than as
an external (objective) reality. The sociologist’s task is to explain the ideas, beliefs and
motives of social actors – to interpret the meaning of social events. Sociology’s subject
matter is the meaning of social-historical reality. This approach rejects the view that
the methods of the natural sciences are appropriate for sociologists, emphasising for
instance the extent to which the social world is complex and messy; that inanimate
entities such as rocks and chemicals cannot attribute meaning to their experiences,
nor can they exercise agency or engage in social interaction – all key concerns of the
sociologist.

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Realism

In contrast, the realist approach argues that there is an external (objective) social
reality, but that it is not immediately (subjectively) apprehensible. The task of the
sociologist is to uncover underlying social structures – the reality that underpins and
explains particular events. Sociology is seen as an empirically based, rational and
objective discipline, but realists make a distinction between explanation and prediction
and see the primary object as explanation. Realist sociologists explain why something
happens by showing how and by what means it occurs.

Postmodernism

A postmodernist approach argues that there are only interpretations – ‘readings’ – of

social texts (phenomena capable of multiple meaning and interpretation), that there
is an indeterminacy and heterogeneity of actual meanings and meaning-productions.
Like the idealist approach it rejects the ideals of objectivity and neutral judgement
and argues that such ideas are the creation of social beings rather than the (more or
less adequate) representations of material reality. However, postmodernists reject the
idea that in order to know about the social world we need to transcend our own
position so as to achieve objective knowledge, emphasising instead that all knowledge
is situated, partial and provisional; in other words, relative. Whereas modernists tend
to argue that objective knowledge can be obtained, in principle at least – and that
scientific knowledge is thereby objective as opposed to the everyday subjective
knowledge of ‘lay people’, for postmodernists subjectivity cannot be transcended even
in principle – there is no objective ‘view from outside’. Furthermore, given the multi-
plicity of subject positions and the ways human beings make and continuously remake
meaning in the world, so that there are endless ‘points of view’, claims to the discovery
of universal, foundational ‘truth’ are seen as meaningless.
Sociologists (and feminists), then, disagree about what valid sociological knowledge
is, and about how that knowledge can best be obtained and defended. Thus sociology
and feminism are characterised by fierce and open debates about intractable and
important questions. Students have traditionally been introduced to sociological theory
via a ‘schools of thought’ approach, each perspective being seen as internally coherent
and as rejecting the validity of other approaches. However, there has been a move
more recently in sociology (largely since the impact of postmodernist thought on the
discipline in the past decade or so) to accept that all theories, all understandings,
all explanations are provisional and partial, and perhaps that they provide different
(compatible rather than competing) versions of ‘truth’. Although, as we noted above,
some explanations continue to be seen as more important, more authoritative and
therefore more ‘truthful’ than others – namely malestream rather than feminist theories.
In sum, sociologists and feminists do need a framework that enables them to
make sense of the social world, to make it meaningful and intelligible. There is no
one sociological or feminist perspective, but a set of interrelated theories all providing
provisional and partial accounts. Some of them provide competing explanations, but
others provide (compatible) understandings of different aspects of social reality and

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social processes and enable us to make some theoretical sense of what is going on in
the social world, however we conceptualise it.

Feminist theory

There are a wide variety of feminist views regarding the relationship between feminism
and malestream social, political and cultural theory. As Chris Beasley puts it:

They range from a perspective which considers feminism and mainstream theory
to be compatible and quite similar, to an approach which sees feminism as break-
ing down the very categories that are used in traditional theory. . . . However,
the critique offered by feminism – that is, the viewpoint that there is something
inadequate and unjust about traditional theory – is more straightforwardly
encapsulated than what feminism offers as the alternative. What feminism actually
offers, beyond its initial criticism of existing thought, is very diverse. And so the
question remains, ‘what is feminism?’
(Beasley, 1999, pp. 14–15)

Feminism, like sociology, is a theory – a world view. However, it is not a unified

one; feminists do not agree on the ways in which we can explain women’s subordi-
nation or on how women can be emancipated, or even on what constitutes oppression.
As Alison Jagger (1983, p. 353) has put it, ‘there are many ways of being a feminist’.
Indeed, by the close of the twentieth century, Western feminism could no longer be
divided simply into the general categories of liberal, radical and Marxist traditions – if
indeed, it ever could. ‘Many other approaches, drawing upon an increasingly eclectic
and sometimes rather inaccessible range of social and political theories, became a
feature of academic feminism at least’ (Beasley, 1999, p. 65).
Hence, there are now a large number of feminist perspectives, and feminist
sociology draws on a wide range of disciplines, so that any attempt to classify femi-
nist theories is fraught with problems. Also, the impact of postmodern thought
on sociology means that theoretical perspectives that might previously have been
regarded as incompatible (Marxist and radical feminisms, for instance) have in some
ways begun to cross-fertilise. Similarly, the assumption that sociologists adhered to
one particular theoretical perspective and so rejected all others out of hand has also
been largely disregarded. Any system of classification is therefore arbitrary and
incomplete. It is arbitrary because we force ideas into a category, one with which
feminist theorists themselves may not identify, and describe a given position as if it
were totally unified rather than representing a range of ideas that show some broad
agreement, or that share certain concepts and influences in common. It is incomplete
because our categories do not incorporate all feminisms (psychoanalytic and
existentialist feminisms, for instance, have not been included here as, to date, their
impact on sociological thought has been relatively limited).
Early second wave feminism (in the 1960s and 1970s) emphasised the role of
structural and material factors in understanding women’s oppression, whereas more
recent approaches (largely since the 1980s) have shifted the feminist focus to symbolic

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and representational issues, addressing questions of power, knowledge and subjec-

tivity. This has led some feminists to argue that the arts, humanities and philosophy
have replaced sociology as the major arenas in which feminist theorising takes place.
In part, we hope to counter this claim by demonstrating the breadth and depth of
ideas that feminists have contributed to sociology in recent years, and by outlining the
ways in which feminist thought has been shaped by an engagement with ongoing
theoretical debates within the discipline. We are not therefore stressing the primacy
of any one theoretical perspective, but try to show the strengths and weaknesses of
each. The epistemological foundations of different feminist positions are explored
more fully in Chapter 13.
We have identified seven feminist perspectives: liberal, Marxist, radical, dual-
systems, postmodernist, critical, Black/post-colonial. We also consider post-feminism
here (as both an empirical claim, and a theoretical disposition). All these perspectives
address the question of what constitutes the oppression of women, how that oppression
might be explained, and all suggest strategies for overcoming it. All argue that women
are oppressed but they differ in their explanations of the ‘cause’ of this oppression and
their suggested strategies for overcoming it. In brief, liberal feminism is concerned
to uncover the immediate forms of discrimination against women and to fight for legal,
educational and other reforms to overcome them. Marxist feminists argue that the
family is a key site of women’s oppression on a global scale and that the struggle
for gender emancipation is an integral part of the struggle against capitalism. Radical
feminists see male control of women (patriarchy) as the main problem and argue that
women across the world must fight to free themselves from this control. Dual-systems
feminists argue that women’s oppression is both an aspect of capitalism and of
patriarchal relations. An end to capitalism, they argue, will not lead automatically
to the emancipation of woman (hence, gender inequalities in socialist or communist
societies) – women also need to fight to free themselves from control by men.
Postmodernist/poststructuralist theories argue that we need to deconstruct the
binary oppositions through which women are constructed as socially inferior. They also
argue that rationality, and therefore sociology, is a product of a masculine (phallo-
centric) attempt to objectify and control the world. Materialist/critical feminists
argue that women as a social group are exploited and subordinated by men as a group,
and that sexual difference (the social differences between men and women) provides
merely the ideological justification rather than the foundation for this exploitation.
Black and post-colonial feminists argue that a feminist perspective needs to take into
account the impact of race and racism, as well as issues of global power relations,
migration and colonialism in understanding women’s oppression, and to be more
reflexive about ethnocentrism within (white, mainstream) feminism.
Feminist theories differ, then, according to the ways in which they explain the
subordination of women, and the different theories mean that feminists working
from different perspectives tend to be interested in different aspects of the social world,
to ask different questions and to come to different conclusions. This will become
evident as you read this book, when we look at specific aspects of men’s and women’s
lives. One key concern that unites these otherwise disparate perspectives is the
meaning and significance of sexual difference: the difference between men and women
as social subjects.

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Feminist debates on sexual difference

As Chris Beasley (1999, p. 15) notes, ‘sexual difference is inevitably of some importance
in feminism given feminists’ inclination to consider the subject of “women” – a group-
ing identified by sex differentiation’. Broadly speaking, sexual difference refers to
the difference between men and women as social subjects, and not merely to biological
differences between males and females, or to gender differences between masculinity
and femininity, and is thought, by most feminists, to be one of the primary forms
of social stratification. Seyla Benhabib (1992, p. 152) defines sexual difference as ‘the
social-historical, symbolic constitution and interpretation of the differences between
men and women’. Chris Beasley outlines four approaches to understanding sexual
difference within feminism. We would describe these as:

1 humanism
2 gynocentrism
3 postmodernism, and
4 critical feminism.

Humanism

Humanist feminists who emphasise not difference but ‘sameness’ argue that, as rational
social beings, men and women are essentially the same and hence, are engaged
in reworking what they regard as defective, ill-conceived, biased or ideological repre-
sentations of women in social theory and society. These feminists argue that men and
women are human beings, but that women have been denied many of the rights
and responsibilities accorded to humanity, resulting in the restriction of women’s
potential. From this perspective, ‘women are seen as capable of doing what men do,
as capable of being “men” and are expected to enter the world of men’ (Beasley, 1999,
p. 15). This approach is described variously as equality, egalitarian or humanist
feminism, and is associated most commonly with liberal feminism, but also with
Marxist and socialist feminisms, and often with the work of feminists based in the UK
and North America. For this reason, this approach is also often termed (perhaps
oversimplistically) Anglo-American feminism.

Gynocentrism

Gynocentric (woman-centred) perspectives emphasise women’s difference from

men (or rather, the difference between men and women), and define their political
agenda largely in relation to a celebration or valorisation of women’s social and cultural
constitution as different. ‘Difference feminism’ as it has come to be known involves
reconceiving the relationship between men and women as ‘different but comple-
mentary’. This involves valuing difference but, crucially, seeking to dismantle and
undermine the hierarchy underlying the relationship between men and women in
patriarchal societies. By contrast with views found in traditional, malestream thought,

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where women’s difference from men is taken as indicative of inferiority, sexual

difference is celebrated by those who champion gynocentric feminism. This celebration
is most commonly associated with radical feminism.
Some feminists consider women’s difference from men to render them ethically
superior; to be somehow better than men – more caring or intuitive, for instance. This
approach involves not so much a flattening, but rather a reversal of the traditional
gender hierarchy that tends to characterise patriarchal societies. In other words,

the hierarchical relationship between the sexes assumed to be associated with

sexual difference in mainstream theory is turned upside down. The notion of
women as better people is often (though not always) connected to a perception
of women as innately, intrinsically pre-eminent.
(Beasley, 1999, p. 18, original emphasis)

Women’s inherent superiority is often deemed to be associated with their moral–

ethical constitution, deriving from the life-giving potential of their bodies and/or their
close connection with others (through, for instance, their emotional disposition,
experience of socialisation, child bearing/rearing capacities, and so on). Such an
approach is particularly associated with North American radical feminism of the
1970s, and its various antecedents such as Carol Gilligan’s (1982) work on women
and ethics.

Postmodernism

An increasing number of (relatively disparate) feminists writing largely since the 1980s
(or whose work has been translated into English since then) have expressed concerns
regarding any straightforward distinction between sameness and difference. They
tend to emphasise men’s and women’s difference from each other, but in a less cele-
bratory way than gynocentric feminists, acknowledging that some of these differences
remain problematic. They are thus less inclined than the previous group to celebrate
sexual difference but instead seek to reflect critically on how differences between
men and women are constructed and maintained. This latter approach has come to
be associated most commonly with (Western) European or Continental feminism, and
has sought to deconstruct sexual difference, focusing on the ways in which differences
between men and women (as well as amongst men, and amongst women) are socially
constructed. In particular, this approach is characteristic of poststructuralist and
postmodern feminism. (Again, however, this categorisation is somewhat simplistic,
because the division of feminist thought into ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘European’ con-
flates many complex diversities both within and between these bodies of work, as well
as serving to exclude those writers whose work may fit somewhere in between.)

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Critical feminism

Several feminist writers have also argued that men and women are not necessarily the
same in an ontological sense; that is, they do not experience the same biological or
social reality, but that they are allies engaged in many of the same political struggles.
The issue of sexual difference (the question of whether men and women are the same,
or different) is thus viewed through a political lens – men and women are seen to
be essentially and/or socio-culturally different, but often occupying the same political
or social position (in terms of social class or race and ethnicity, for instance). It is this
similarity in political struggle or marginalisation that is seen to produce the similarities
between men and women rather than some essential ‘humanity’. Feminists adopting
this critical perspective tend to perceive women as the same or as different from
men in a range of ways, but all tend to be wary of any position that celebrates women’s
existence as a universal or essential group in the way that gynocentric feminists tend
to. This way of thinking about sexual difference is the starting point for several theoretical
perspectives within feminism, and is associated with Black and post-colonial feminists
concerned with racism and ethnocentrism, and with feminist critical theory.
Feminists respond to the question ‘Are men and women the same or different?’ in
a number of ways then, depending on whether a humanist, gynocentric, postmodernist
or critical perspective is adopted. Each of these different ways of understanding sexual
difference – of thinking about the nature of the social relationship between men and
women, and of what it means to be a man or a woman in a patriarchal society – provide
the basis for the various, and increasingly complex, theoretical perspectives that
constitute contemporary feminist thought.

Feminist theoretical perspectives

Liberal/reformist feminist theory

In some ways liberal feminism is the most widely known form of feminist thought,
and perhaps the easiest to understand in relation to the question of sexual difference
– largely because of its associations with equal rights and equal opportunities. It is
perhaps the most moderate or mainstream version of feminism in this respect, and
is therefore also often referred to as reformist or equality feminism. It is also quint-
essentially modernist, largely because of its commitment to humanism (a belief in
the advancement of humanity by its own efforts), emancipation (freedom from un-
necessary social, political or legal restrictions) and the creation of a just society (based
for liberal feminists on a meritocracy in which power and reward are distributed solely
on the basis of ability and effort, rather than gender privilege).
Liberal feminism has inherited from liberal political thought a conception of men
and women as the same; this sameness is located, for liberal feminists, in men and
women’s equal (human) capacity for rational thought and action. As Beasley notes
(1999, p. 52, original emphasis): ‘liberal feminist political strategies reflect a conception
of a fundamentally sexually undifferentiated human nature – that is, since women are much
the same as men, women should be able to do what men do.’

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Liberal feminists place great emphasis on the rights of individuals to compete in

the public sphere (in the labour market, for instance) and also on what they see as
the corresponding responsibilities of individuals to take part in public life (in politics
for instance, or through financial contributions to social welfare). Liberal feminists
emphasise that women’s unequal position is a result of artificial barriers to women’s
full participation in the public sphere (beyond the home and the family), and hence their
inability to fulfil their potential as human beings (as men’s equals). One of the key
political goals associated with liberal feminism is therefore equality of opportunity.
Public citizenship and the attainment of equality with men in the public sphere are
central to this approach.

Liberal (equality) feminism, then, asks for equality in the sense of sameness of
attainment, and therefore treatment, and justifies it via sameness, ‘androgyny’.
It says: we deserve to be equal with you, for we are in fact the same. We possess the
same capabilities; but this fact has been hidden, or these abilities have, while still
potentially ours, been socialized, educated ‘out’.
(Evans, 1995, p. 13, emphasis added)

Liberal feminism has therefore been concerned to argue for equal rights for
women – for women to have the same citizenship rights as men. Equality feminists have
fought against laws and practices that give rights to men and not women, or which
are designed to ‘protect’ women. Recognising that mere formal equality is insufficient,
they have also advocated the passing of laws to outlaw discrimination against women
and to give women rights in the workplace such as maternity leave and pay, although
the global impact of this has been variable.
Women, liberal feminists argue, are human beings; they have the same inalienable
rights as men. A woman’s sex is irrelevant to her rights; women are capable of full
rationality and therefore are entitled to full human rights. However, women are denied
equal rights with men, and as a group are not allowed some freedoms that men
as a group are permitted to enjoy. Furthermore, while men are judged on merit as
individuals, women tend to be judged on their accomplishments as females – that
is, they are denied the same right as men to pursue their own interests.
In sociology, liberal or ‘reformist’ feminists have been concerned to demon-
strate that the observable differences between the sexes are not innate but a result of
socialisation or ‘sex-role conditioning’. The ways in which boys and girls are treated
differently, from about the moment of birth (or even before), arguably discourage
women from developing their full potential as human beings. Feminist researchers
have carried out research to demonstrate that women are discriminated against and
treated differently from men, and argue that this explains women’s subordinate position
in society. To liberate women it is necessary to demonstrate that men and women are
equal in potential, that women are fully human, that the differences between men and
women in Western society are due to the different ways in which boys and girls are
socialised and the different social expectations they face, together with discriminatory
legislation.
Liberal feminism has certainly had a major impact on feminist theory and
sociology particularly in Western societies – the publication of Betty Friedan’s book

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The Feminine Mystique in 1963 is cited by Judith Evans (1995) as the start of second
wave feminism, for instance. However, it has been criticised on a number of grounds,
particularly for its seemingly uncritical acceptance of male values as human values.
This has led to accusations that liberal feminists suffer from a kind of ‘penis envy’
(Tong, 1998, p. 31). Indeed, Tong goes on to criticise liberal feminism on the grounds
that it valorises a gender-neutral humanism over a gender-specific feminism.
Sociological research from a reformist position does not tend to explore women’s
lived experiences, nor does it challenge the use of concepts and tools developed to
explore society from the standpoint of men. Further, it does not really explain women’s
inequality (as it fails to take account of the structural origins and implications of
the gender inequalities constraining women), it merely describes and challenges it.
Liberal feminists place considerable emphasis on disadvantage being the sum total
of individual (or collective) acts of discrimination. In this sense, their faith in legislation
and education as the ‘solutions’ to gender discrimination ignores invisible, structural
or cultural constraints that might defy such practices. Nor does liberal feminism
adequately challenge malestream views of what the major issues are. It argues for the
incorporation of women in research samples and for women to carry out research,
but leaves intact the foundations of existing theoretical perspectives. However,
research from this perspective has demonstrated the ways in which women are denied
equal opportunities and are discriminated against, and has challenged the view that
inequalities between men and women are adequately explained by biological sex
differences.

Radical feminism

Unlike other versions of feminist theory radical feminism is not drawn directly from
other bodies of malestream social, political or cultural theory – it is feminism in its
‘purest’ form, some might argue. It offers a challenge to, and a vehement rejection
of, the humanism (and commitment to ‘sameness’) underpinning liberal feminism.
Radical feminism is concerned with women’s rights, rather than gender equality
and emphasises (rather than seeks to overcome) the differences between men and
women. In this respect, radical feminism is sometimes also referred to as gynocentrism
(a woman-centred approach). Gynocentrism maintains the existence of a female or
feminine nature that has been concealed and/or distorted throughout history; one
that needs to be liberated and revalued.
Radical feminists argue that women’s oppression is primary and fundamental.
Patriarchy, an elaborate system of male domination which pervades all aspects of
social and cultural life, is seen as trans-historical and global and is accorded particu-
lar explanatory power within radical feminism. Although the subject of considerable
debate, the term patriarchy is widely used by radical feminists to refer to a society based
on universal male supremacy and female subordination. All women are oppressed
irrespective of historical, national, cultural, class or racial or ethnic differences. The
notion that all women share an experience of oppression is intimately connected with
a strong emphasis on sisterhood in radical feminism. The family is seen as a key instru-
ment of the oppression of women, through sexual and maternal obligation, as is male

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control of women’s bodies. One of the key concerns of radical feminists in this respect
is the extent to which women themselves become so oppressed by patriarchal
ideologies that they perpetuate men’s control of women’s bodies themselves. Radical
feminists have cited cultural practices ranging from Chinese foot binding to wearing
Wonderbras as examples of female collusion with patriarchal oppression. Radical
feminists do not, on the whole, deny biological differences between men and women,
but they challenge the meanings given to them. Women’s oppression is seen as rooted
either in men’s control of women’s biological capacity for motherhood or in the innate,
biologically determined aggression of the male, as manifest in rape or in the ritual
stoning of women accused of adultery, for instance.
The central tenet of radical feminism is that gender inequalities are the outcome
of an autonomous system of patriarchy and are the primary form of social inequality.
They argue that there has always been a sexual division of labour underpinning and
reinforcing a system of male domination. Patriarchy is a universal system in which
men dominate women. Radical feminists argue that no area of society is free from
male definition, and consequently every aspect of women’s lives currently accepted
as ‘natural’ has to be questioned and alternative ways of living together as men and
women must be found. Theory, they argue, is not a specialist area of academic activity,
carried out by an intellectual elite, but is an integral aspect of feminist practice and
politics. Theory arises out of practice and is continually measured against experience
and continually reformulated. In practice, therefore, radical feminists have approached
the dismantling of patriarchy through the pursuit of political action calling for change
in gender relations, drawing political strength primarily from women’s organisations.
In contrast to liberal feminists, radical feminists tend to be very suspicious of govern-
ment intervention, perceiving the state itself to be inherently patriarchal; dominated
by men and men’s interests (MacKinnon, 1987).
Radical feminists do, however, reject the view that women’s subordination is
anything to do with their biological inferiority. They reject the idea that the victim
(woman) is to blame. Those who do argue for a biological explanation argue that
male biology is to blame: men are naturally aggressive and use their aggression to
control women (as, for example, in rape and domestic violence). Mary Daly (1978), in
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, documents the ways in which men
have used aggression to control women. She cites Indian suttee, Chinese foot binding,
African ‘genital mutilation’, European witch hunts and American gynaecology as
examples of the ways in which men have systematically abused women and used
violence against women’s bodies to control them (and continue to do so). Some
feminists such as Daly encourage women to create a new identity for themselves
founded on ‘true’ femaleness, based on the biological nature of women which has been
distorted by patriarchy. Women are encouraged to celebrate a new female creativity,
based on sisterhood and self-identification. They reject androgyny because they argue
that the most valuable qualities are those that are specific to women and, therefore,
that women are morally superior to men. Also, because men dominate women even
in the most intimate of relationships, women must live separately from men. The ideal,
they argue, is for women to live free from patriarchy, which divides and mutilates them.
For radical feminists the subordination of women is the central concern, and their
theories seek to uncover and eliminate the subordination of women by men. Men, it

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is argued, systematically dominate women in every sphere of life, and all relationships
between men and women are institutionalised relationships of power and therefore an
appropriate subject for political analysis. Thus radical feminists are concerned to reveal
how male power is exercised and reinforced in all spheres of life, including ‘personal’
relationships such as child-rearing, housework and marriage and in all kinds of sexual
practices including rape, prostitution, pornography, sexual harassment and sexual
intercourse, and in the purchasing of so-called ‘mail order’ brides from developing
countries or in practices of ‘sex tourism’ (see Chapter 8), for instance.
Radical feminists argue that women’s culture, knowledge, and lived experience
have all been denied by men – what is taken as ‘truth’ has been defined by men. Male
science (including social science) has been used to legitimate the ideologies that define
women as inferior, and women’s role to be that of domestic labourers. Sociology is
seen as part of this male-defined, distorting male culture. Radical feminists, then, do
not want to participate in sociology – to bring women in – but to transform the way
knowledge is produced so that women’s subjective understandings are revalued. Much
radical feminist research has been concerned with analysing male violence towards
women and the ways in which this is hidden, marginalised or blamed on women
by malestream social science imbued with patriarchal values. Radical feminists have
also been concerned to uncover ‘her-story’, to recover for women their own cultural
heritage and to reveal the ways in which women’s knowledge and lived experience
have been devalued and distorted.
Radical feminism has uncovered the ways in which even the most intimate and
personal relationships are political – that is, are power relationships. They have also
documented the universality of patriarchal relations. However, they have failed to
adequately explain the ways in which women are subordinated and exploited by
men in relation to either continuities or changes in patriarchy. They tend not to take
sufficient account of the diverse forms that patriarchal relationships can take in different
societies. They also tend to discount the ways in which men and women’s experiences
are shaped not simply by sexual difference, and patriarchal relations, but also by a
whole range of other factors such as social class, nationality, race and ethnicity,
sexuality, age, and so on (see Chapter 3) which problematise the concept of a ‘universal
sisterhood’.
Radical feminist biological explanations, while very different from those developed
by malestream theorists, are equally reductionist and fail to take account of ideology
and culture. Also they give the opportunity for socio-biological theories to be devel-
oped as a counter to feminist ones – theories that argue that women’s role as presently
constituted is naturally determined. However, not all radical feminists accept biological
theories, arguing that they are developed to justify the subordination of women and
that it is necessary to challenge the argument that there are two biologically determined
sexes.

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Marxist feminism

The third major feminist theoretical tradition we consider here derives from Marxism,
and was particularly influential (often in dialogue with radical feminism) in the 1960s
and 1970s. As Chris Beasley observes, however,

while the impact of Marxism on feminist theory remains evident in a number

of contemporary approaches (such as psychoanalytic and postmodern/post-
structuralist feminisms, as well as those concerned with race and ethnicity), the
Marxist feminist tradition is now waning,
(Beasley, 1999, p. 58)

and has been largely superseded by feminist critical theory, that we consider below.
Indeed, Curthoys (cited in Beasley, 1999, p. 59) asserts (perhaps prematurely, given
that many feminists are still influenced by Marxism, even if they don’t actually label
themselves as Marxist feminists), that Marxist feminism ‘more or less died at the end
of the 1980s’.
Marxist feminism is sometimes also referred to as materialist feminism because
of its emphasis on concrete, structural aspects of social organisation, particularly
the role of the family and the sexual division of labour. As Kuhn and Wolpe (1978,
p. 9) have put it; ‘in this context, two interrelated issues are raised – the family and the
sexual division of labour – whose crucial importance to a theorisation of the situation
of women is constantly claimed.’
Marxist feminism developed out of feminist attempts to adapt Marxist theory
so that it might provide an adequate explanation for the subordination and exploita-
tion of women in capitalist societies. Marxist feminists recognise that Marxism is
inadequate as it stands and needs to be developed in order to explain why women are
excluded from the public sphere and are the main unpaid workers in the domestic
sphere. They have also had to deal with the ‘fact’ that women did not become
subordinated under capitalism but were subordinated already, and with the strong
suspicion that the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production would not result in
the emancipation of women – as has been demonstrated in Eastern European societies,
for instance. However, while they recognise that the struggle between the sexes is not
reducible to the class struggle, they tend to give primacy to the latter.
For Marxist feminists the defining feature of contemporary society is capitalism,
within which women are subject to a special form of oppression, one that is mainly
the effect of their exclusion from wage labour and of their role in the domestic sphere
reproducing the capitalist relations of production. The main beneficiary of women’s
unpaid labour is capitalism, although men also benefit to some extent. Marxist feminists
argue that women’s role in the family benefits capitalism in three basic ways:

1 women perform domestic labour on an unpaid basis, and provide care for the current
(and increasingly the previous) generation of workers;
2 women also reproduce and socialise the next generation of workers;
3 women consume the goods and services produced by capitalism.

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A major problem that Marxist feminists confront is that Marx himself was not
particularly concerned with the position of women in capitalist society. Marx rejected
notions of morality, justice and equal rights as bourgeois ideas. He was concerned not
with reform, but with developing a scientific account of the exploitation of the working
class under capitalism, with a view to overthrowing that system.
The concepts Marx uses appear to be neutral, but they are in fact phallocentric;
he fails to recognise that women are subject to a special form of oppression within
capitalist societies and does not analyse gender differences and gender ideologies.
Although he uses abstract categories such as ‘labour power’, his specific analyses
suggest that he assumed a male waged labour force. He also adopted a naturalistic
approach to the family, maintaining that women should provide care in the domestic
sphere. The paid labour of women and children was seen by Marx as a threat to
male workers – women and children, he argued, were used by capitalists to reduce
the costs of production. Cheap female labour was or could be used to replace more
expensive male labour. (Marx did not challenge the practice of paying women less than
men.) This analysis ignores the fact that women have always made a contribution
to the economic survival of the household and does not challenge the view that men
should be paid more for their labour than women – presumably because men should
be paid a family wage.
Marxist feminists want to retain the Marxist analysis of capitalist societies,
integrating into it an explanation for the subordination of women. A starting point
for the development of a Marxist feminist theory was the work of Engels, Marx’s
collaborator. In his analysis of the relationship between the origins of the family and
the development of capitalism, Engels (1972 [1884]) argues that the bourgeois nuclear
family was formed because of the needs of the capitalist system, and specifically
because men wanted to pass on their property to their legitimate heirs. Engels argues
that this meant men needed to control women in marriage so that they knew
who their heirs were. Women’s subordinate position was/is a form of oppression that
serves the interests of capitalism. All women are oppressed, whether they are married
to bourgeois or proletarian men.
Marxist feminists have adapted this line to develop a theory which attempts
to provide an adequate account of the subordination of women as well as forms of
class exploitation and which overcomes the theoretical marginalisation of women
in conventional Marxist theory. They seek to analyse and explain the relationship
between the subordination of women and other aspects of the organisation of the
capitalist mode of production. The attempt to marry Marxism with feminism has
been difficult, but Marxist feminists have argued that it is essential to recognise that
the oppression of women is inextricably linked to the capitalist order. Given this,
coupled with Marxism’s sex-blindness, it is necessary to reformulate Marxist theory
so that it provides an adequate explanation for the subordination of women, and
of ethnic minorities and other exploited groups in capitalist societies as well. Such a
theory, it is argued, will enable us to develop strategies that result in the emancipation
of subordinated groups – something that the overthrow of the capitalist system would
not automatically achieve by itself.
The major problem with Marxist feminist theory is that it places insufficient
emphasis on the ways in which men oppress women, and the ways in which men

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benefit from their unpaid domestic labour. While Marxist feminists have recognised
that it is necessary to understand the importance of patriarchal relationships and how
these are intertwined with capitalism, they see them as relatively static and fail to
recognise that there is no necessary and inevitable congruence between the interests
of patriarchy and the interests of capital. Marxist feminism tends to reduce feminist
(gendered) explanations to the categories of Marxist theory, then. It fails to take
account of patriarchal relationships in societies other than capitalist ones, nor does it
fully consider the specific location of women in post-colonial or developing societies.
Much like radical feminism, it also tends to be relatively abstract and far removed from
the everyday experiences of women in their relationships with men.

Dual-systems theory

Largely since the 1980s, and as a consequence of debates between radical and Marxist
feminisms that took place a decade or so previously, socialist feminists began to
develop a perspective that has come to be known as dual-systems theory. Socialist or
dual-systems feminists argue that what is necessary is a dual analysis that articulates
Marxist class theory with a feminist theory of patriarchy; a theory that takes account
of what unites all women – oppression by men – as well as the class divisions between
us. Dual-systems theory therefore attempts to maintain the materialist elements
of Marxism, whilst incorporating a radical feminist emphasis on patriarchy and gender
oppression into its perspective. While Marxist feminist theory continues to give
primacy to class analysis, dual-systems feminists take as their concern the relationship
of women to the economic system as well as the relationship of women to men.
The key question for dual-systems feminists is the cause of male exploitation and
domination of women. Dual-systems feminist Heidi Hartmann (1978) points out
that the categories of Marxism are sex-blind and that patriarchal oppression preceded
capitalism and undoubtedly succeeds it as well. In order to understand the sub-
ordination of women in capitalist societies, she suggests, it is necessary to articulate
Marxism with a critique of patriarchy – that is, to show the specific form that female
exploitation takes in capitalist societies.
The form that patriarchy takes under capitalism is seen to be different from the
form that it takes in other socio-economic systems. Patriarchy predates capitalism,
but it takes new forms within distinct stages of capitalist development. In agricultural/
developing societies men have to leave their home to work, and women work both
in the home and in the fields. With industrialisation men tend to go out to work, and
women are gradually excluded from much paid work (as Engels (1972) noted, the
separation of the public and private spheres occurred following industrialisation
in Europe). The confinement of women to the home is not unique to capitalist society,
however; in most Islamic societies – industrial and pre-industrial – women are confined
to the home, and upper-class women did not work in pre-industrial or industrial Europe.
However, the development of industrial capitalism did lead to changes. Women
were excluded from certain types of paid work, especially skilled work, and lost certain
legal rights they had previously held over property. Men also made gains: men had
control over credit, and some men but few women had access to political arenas

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including Parliament. Men developed many new bases of power in the public sphere
from which women were barred, and domestic ideologies became more dominant. The
form that women’s subordination takes in capitalist society is not an outcome of the
logic of capitalism or patriarchy, but the result of a shift in the resources of male power
consequent upon the development of capitalism. Men were in a position to develop
new power bases as the domestic economy contracted and was replaced by capitalist
production.
Dual-systems theory, then, attempts to develop an analysis that recognises two
systems: the economic and the sex–gender. Patriarchy is seen as trans-historical –
that is, men exercise power over women in all societies. However, an adequate feminist
theory, dual-systems feminists argue, has to recognise that patriarchy takes a specific
form in capitalist societies. The aim is to develop a theory of capitalist patriarchy
that makes possible an understanding of the ways in which the capitalist system
is structured by male domination.
Marxist theory presents the world from the position of the proletariat (working
class); what is necessary, dual-systems feminists argue, is to develop a world view
from the position of women. Traditional Marxist theory ignores women’s labour
outside of the market (domestic labour) and the gender-defined character of women’s
work within the market, and therefore obscures the systematic domination of women
by men. Women, however, are controlled both by the ruling class and by men; male
capitalists determine the conditions under which women sell their labour, and male
workers receive monetary and other advantages from the fact that women’s waged
labour is remunerated at a lower rate than men’s, and that women perform unpaid
domestic labour. Also, men’s sexual desires are taken as primary in the definition of
women as sexual objects.
To understand women’s oppression fully it is necessary to examine the sexual
division of labour in the domestic sphere as well as in the labour market, and the
relationship between the two. Women’s reproductive labour limits their access to wage
labour, but the limited range of wage labour available to women is what drives many
of them into marriage. The ideology of marriage and motherhood as women’s primary
role serves to conceal this. The public/private distinction not only benefits capital
but also men. The exclusion of women from the public sphere benefits men as well
as capitalists, while women’s unpaid domestic labour also benefits both men and
capitalists.
Sylvia Walby (1990), emphasising the need for a dual analysis, argues that in
capitalist society the key sites of patriarchal relations are to be found in domestic work,
paid work, the state, culture, male violence and sexuality. Social relations in domestic
work constitute the patriarchal mode of production, and this, she argues, is of particular
significance in the determination of gender relations. However, when patriarchy is
articulated with the capitalist mode of production, patriarchal relations in paid work
are of central importance to the maintenance of the system. Walby also argues that
throughout the course of the twentieth century, a shift from private to public patriarchy
occurred in capitalist societies, partly because of the capitalist demand for labour and
partly, somewhat ironically perhaps, as a result of feminist political activity. However,
the interests of patriarchy and of capital are not necessarily the same; the main basis
of the tension between the two lies in the exploitation of women’s labour. It is in

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capital’s interests, she argues, to recruit and exploit cheap female labour, labour which
is cheaper than men’s because of patriarchal structures and ideologies. This is resisted
by patriarchy, which seeks to maintain the exploitation of women in the household.
When men struggle to exclude women from competition for jobs, there is a strong
cross-class patriarchal alliance. However, this cross-class alliance is weakened when
it is in the interests of employers (capitalists) to recruit women, and then there is conflict
between capitalism and patriarchy.
A way of reaching what Walby describes as a ‘mutual accommodation’ is for
capital to recruit women to jobs defined as women’s jobs – jobs which pay less than
men’s and which have a lower status. When this happens patriarchy fights to ensure
that women are recruited only for women’s work. Walby argues that the power of
capital prevents this exclusionary strategy working in the long term and that segre-
gation develops as an alternative at least in part because of the feminist movement
– women demanding the right to have paid employment. Consequently, in Britain
there has been a move from private patriarchy to a more public form, marked by a shift
from exclusionary to segregation-based labour market strategies.
Despite its attempt to develop a more complex account of men and women’s
relative social and economic position than radical or Marxist feminism, dual-systems
theory has been criticised for its lack of theoretical sophistication (for being unable, for
instance, to articulate the nature of the ‘duality’ of capitalism and patriarchy). It has
also been criticised because it tends to marginalise other categories of power (distinct
from, but related to, class and gender) such as race and ethnicity, for instance, or
to take account of global dynamics in shaping the relationship between patriarchy and
capitalism.

Postmodern feminism

There has been a widespread debate within feminist theory and sociology more
generally about the relationship between feminism and postmodernism. Within feminist
thought, postmodernism tends to be viewed as either an unprecedented opportunity
for women to resist their designation as the ‘second sex’ (de Beauvoir, 1988), or as a
theoretical movement that is politically disabling, just as feminism is beginning to make
a political and social impact (Nicholson, 1990). Many feminists have been critical of the
ways in which modernist theory devalued their concerns. Their dissatisfaction with
modernism’s legacy therefore led many feminists to develop an interest in, and affinity
with, postmodernism. In particular, postmodern feminists have

mobilized the postmodern critique of the authority and status of science, truth,
history, power, knowledge and subjectivity, bringing a transformative gender
dimension to postmodern theory and developing new ways of understanding
sexual difference.
(Weedon, 1997, p. 171)

One of the main difficulties we face when considering the ideas of postmodern
feminists is that the terms used to describe their work are often variable and confusing.

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Broadly speaking, we use the term ‘postmodern’ here to refer to a range of ideas
influenced largely by a particular group of (primarily male) French social theorists,
including Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois
Lyotard. It is important to note, however, that the group of writers whose work we
are discussing here tend not to apply the label ‘postmodern’ to their own writing
– rather this is a term used in texts such as this one in an attempt to make sense of
some of the commonalities and differences in their ideas. In this sense, Chris Beasley
(1999, p. 89) goes as far as to assert that the term ‘postmodernism’ was actually ‘made
in America’ and that ‘the invention of the label . . . as a cultural remove . . . may well
have overly encouraged misleading conceptions of it as a coherent intellectual
phenomenon’. Such confusion is hardly surprising, given that if postmodern ideas share
anything in common it tends to be a rejection of the notion of a foundational truth
or essence, in favour of an emphasis on truth as constructed, partial and contingent.
Nevertheless, in terms of their shared critique of modernist conceptions of the self, of
knowledge and of language (as well as their overall impact on contemporary feminist
thought), it makes sense to consider the contribution of postmodernism as a distinct
and relatively coherent perspective.
Postmodern feminists argue that it is not simply that we live in a postmodern
world – the postmodern condition – but that postmodernism is a style or mode of
thinking that is more appropriate than modernist ideas to make sense of that world.
Postmodern theory abandons explanatory goals and realism (a belief in the objective
existence of an external reality) in favour of an extreme form of social consructionism
or idealism, emphasising the discursive nature of reality. This means that, for post-
modernists, there can no longer be any attempt to describe, analyse or explain reality
in an objective or scientific way.
Postmodernism therefore challenges the explanatory (scientific) claims of
approaches such as Marxism that propose an account of society as structured accord-
ing to a determining principle (capitalism). Ironically, we might argue, any unity or
common ground between otherwise disparate ideas lies in their shared antagonism
to singular structural explanations, and their attraction to multiple determinants,
diversity, plurality and indeterminacy. Postmodernists tends to stress the shifting,
fragmented nature of meaning (and relatedly power) rather than its stability, and reject
the idea that a stable relationship exists between an objective social reality and the
language used to represent or describe it.
Among the key ideas that feminism and postmodernism share in common is
a critique of the status of general, universalising theories or what postmodernists term
‘metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984). Feminism has criticised many of the metanarratives
of Western thought (such as liberalism, Marxism, science and philosophy, for instance)
for ignoring or trivialising sexual difference – for failing to regard difference as a
fundamental aspect of human existence or for assuming that differences between men
and women are natural, essential and pre-social (and not therefore the legitimate
concerns of social theory). Postmodernist feminists are therefore inclined to connect
modernist thinking with phallocentrism in (supposedly neutral) claims to knowledge.
Claims to know the ‘truth’, they argue, are not neutral but gender-specific reflections
of power (think, for instance, of the ‘scientific’ claim not uncommon in nineteenth-
century Britain that formal education and over-development of the intellect would

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damage a woman’s reproductive capacities). Postmodern feminists reject claims to

knowledge based on absolute truth or universal meaning, arguing that knowledge is
always contingent and contextual and is shaped by subjective interests. They emphasise,
then, that there is not one truth but many, so that men and women literally ‘know’ the
world differently yet neither version is more or less true than the other.
However, metanarratives have often played a crucial role in feminist political
struggles. For example, Enlightenment ideas about human progress, emancipation
and human rights have been fundamental to feminist theory and politics, in the fight
for political representation and protective legislation, for instance. Hence, while some
feminists have sought to produce their own metanarratives (Marxist feminist theories
of capitalism, or radical feminist accounts of patriarchy, for instance), others have
sought to deconstruct existing metanarratives (arguing that deconstruction in itself is
a political activity), and to develop new (postmodern) theories that insist on specificity
and no longer claim universal or ‘meta’ status.
Such approaches, however, have often been accused of relativism (the belief
that all claims to truth are equally valid), and this is clearly problematic for feminism
given its claim to ‘know’ that women are oppressed and that patriarchy is unjust.
This means that some feminists see postmodernism as a threat to the integrity of
feminism as it undermines the emancipatory potential of feminism as a political
movement. Such feminists have emphasised that much of the feminist critique hinges
on the claim that the oppression of women is ‘irrational’. Hence, ‘if we want to argue
for changing, rather than merely deconstructing, some of the myths of femininity
that have lingered for centuries, we need to admit to holding a rational position from
which to argue this’ (Nicholson, 1990, p. 39).
It is not only metanarratives that both feminism and postmodernism challenge.
Another crucial area in which their respective concerns overlap is on the question of
subjectivity – the nature and status of the social ‘self’. Central to postmodern theory
is the recognition that identity is multiple and provisional – race, sex, age, sexuality,
and so on are constantly revised and renegotiated. By rejecting the idea of an essential
core self constituting the person, postmodernism shifts attention away from the subject
as a manifestation of her ‘essence’ to an emphasis on ‘the subject in process’ – never
unitary or complete. In many ways, this aspect of postmodern feminist thought draws
on de Beauvoir’s (1988, p. 295) contention that ‘One is not born but rather becomes,
a woman’ (see Chapter 1) in its emphasis on becoming gendered as an ongoing social
process. However, rather than seeking to overcome women’s Otherness in the way
that de Beauvoir urged women to, some postmodern feminists tend to celebrate
women’s marginalisation from the malestream, arguing that this marginalisation
enables women to challenge and undermine phallocentrism through the use of irony
and parody (Butler, 1990).
So-called New French feminists (so-named in order to distinguish their work
from de Beauvoir’s earlier, more humanist approach), such as Hélène Cixous, Julia
Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, tend to reject de Beauvoir’s claim that women should
try to overcome their femininity, arguing instead that we cannot reject what it means
to be a woman because within the context of patriarchal discourse and power/
knowledge, women’s ways of being are yet to be understood in their own terms.
In other words, we can never really ‘know’ what it means to be a woman within a

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patriarchal (phallocentric) society because all knowledge – of both men and women
– is patriarchal. This means that postmodern feminists challenge the positioning of
woman as Other, and the privileging of men/masculinity over women/femininity, but
not on the basis of any particular characteristics deemed to distinguish all women (in
the way that some radical feminists do), arguing instead that there is nothing essential
(or even stable) in the category ‘woman’; it has no intrinsic qualities or universal
content, and is yet to be ‘known’ from women’s own perspective.
Some feminists who adopt a postmodern perspective reject the idea of substituting
feminist theories for malestream ones, because they are sceptical about the possibility
of true knowledge and argue instead that there is a multiplicity of truths. They argue
for the need to deconstruct truth claims and analyse the power effects that claims
to truth entail – to recognise, as Foucault (1980) argued, that knowledge is inextricably
a part of power and vice versa. It is therefore necessary to focus on knowledge as
opposed to truth, not only because there is no foundational truth, but because there
is no reality ‘out there’ that can arbitrate between competing truth claims – proving
that some ideas are true and others are false. There is no one truth, no privileged
knowledge or producers of knowledge for postmodern feminists. All knowledge
is historically and culturally specific, the product of particular discourses. The dis-
courses that create knowledge also create power – the power that constitutes subjects
as actors, and the mechanisms through which subjects are subjugated. The power of
particular discourses depends on the extent to which their truth claims are successful
– the extent to which the knowledge they produce is accepted as true, often because
it is produced and disseminated by powerful actors (male sociologists and social
theorists, for instance).
The work of postmodern theorists has been stimulating in raising new questions
about social change and about the nature of feminism and sociology itself, and par-
ticularly so in encouraging a more reflexive approach to the development of feminist
knowledge (see Chapter 13). Those feminists who argue for the development of a
closer engagement between feminism and postmodernism emphasise that such an
alliance would:

1 avoid the perpetuation of the modernist oppression and exclusion of women from
social theory;
2 resolve some of the issues debated in contemporary feminist theory such as the
nature of sexual difference;
3 contribute to debates on postmodernism in the social sciences and humanities
more generally, by integrating a consideration of sexual difference into the
development of theory (‘a dimension lacking in many postmodern accounts’,
Hekman, 1990, p. 3).

Many such feminists believe that feminist notions of the self, knowledge, truth and
language are too contradictory to those of the Enlightenment to be contained within
its theoretical concepts and categories (Flax, 1997). Others have noted, however, that
there is something of ‘an uneasy alliance’ (Benhabib, 1995) between feminism and
postmodernism. On the one hand, because of its challenge to modernist, Enlightenment
thought (the critique of metanarratives, of truth claims, and of a humanist conception

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of the self), feminism appears to be an intellectual ally of postmodernism; on the other

hand, because of its commitment to emancipation and human progress, feminism can
also be seen as a fundamentally modernist movement. As we noted earlier in this
chapter, the historical origins of feminism lie in liberal humanism, a movement that is
one of the primary objects of the postmodern critique. Although Marxist feminism
represents in many respects a rejection of liberal feminism, it too has fundamentally
modernist roots. As Hekman (1990) notes, from both traditions, feminism inherits
a legacy that is thoroughly modernist. Yet, the contradiction between this legacy and
many of the concerns and insights of contemporary, postmodernist feminism means
that attempts to categorise feminist theory as either modernist or postmodernist
continue to be problematic, for in many ways it is both and neither – modernism and
postmodernism being categories of malestream rather than feminist thought.

Feminist critical theory

Several contemporary feminists are working towards attempting to reconcile the

emancipatory impetus of feminism (and its modernist legacy) with the critical insights
of postmodernism. It is at this theoretical juncture that perhaps some of the most
interesting and insightful developments in contemporary feminist theory are taking
place; in work that has come to be known as feminist critical theory.
Feminist critical theory has come to be associated with a body of ideas that draws
together some of the conceptual insights of the poststructuralist critique of modernism,
and subjects these to a revised Marxist approach to feminism. The latter draws from
Marxism an emphasis on the appropriation of women’s labour (both in terms of
paid work and domestic labour) as an experience that many women share in common.
Feminist critical theorists also take from Critical Theory (the body of writing associated
primarily with the Frankfurt School – see Chapter 12) a concern with the role of culture
in maintaining oppressive social relations – hence, they emphasise the need to
understand both material and cultural forms of power in relation to sexual difference.
Whilst those writers who have broadly come to be associated with the development
of feminist critical theory – Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Hartsock, Sandra Harding and Iris
Marion Young, for instance – share in common with postmodernism the conception
of subjectivity as a process, they tend to reject the corresponding emphasis post-
modernism places on this process as discursive. Particularly controversial among
feminists who are unsympathetic to the postmodern project is the view that subjectivity
is merely an effect of discourse. They argue that such an approach effectively denies
women a position from which to develop a critique of patriarchal power relations
outside of this established discourse. Many such feminists argue that postmodernism,
in contesting Enlightenment values such as emancipation and progress, expresses the
claims and needs of white, relatively privileged Western men who have effectively
had their Enlightenment and can now reflect critically on it. Nancy Hartsock, for
instance, asks

Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced
begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects

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of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic? Just
when we are forming our own theories about the world, uncertainty emerges about
whether the world can be theorized. Just when we are talking about the changes
we want, ideas of progress and the possibility of systematically and rationally
organizing human society become dubious and suspect?
(Hartsock, 1990, pp. 163–164)

Postmodernism is often criticised on the basis that it leads to pluralism, relativism

and ultimately to a highly individualistic politics. To avoid this, feminist critical theorists
have argued that feminism requires a general theory of oppression and liberation,
yet one grounded in the lived experience of men and women. Feminist critical theory
thus locates itself neither in the metanarratives of liberal, radical or Marxist feminisms,
nor in the abandonment of theory associated with postmodernism. It is not based
on an essentialist notion of the stable, rational subject of the Enlightenment, or on a
postmodernist conception of the subject as the outcome of discourse, but somewhere
between these two alternatives.
In relation to knowledge, feminist critical theorists do not argue for relativism and
multiplicity, but for ‘the necessarily always partial, historically specific and interested
nature of theory and practice’ (Weedon, 1997, p. 178). Thus, while feminist critical
theorists reject essentialising or totalising theories in the form of metanarratives, they
continue to use theory strategically – namely, in working towards understanding and
transforming oppressive social relations.
As well as a critical engagement with postmodernism, many feminists associated
with feminist critical theory draw (critically) on Marxism, arguing particularly that
Marxist theory contains several features that can help feminists gain a better under-
standing of the social world. However, they have also rejected and questioned some
fundamental categories of Marxist analysis. Hartsock (1998, p. 400) outlines these as
follows:

1 feminists have raised questions about how labour is understood, and have
highlighted the importance of non-waged labour;
2 feminists have challenged the centrality of class as the only foundation for social
analysis;
3 feminist theory raises questions about Marxism as a theory of social evolution and
progress, noting the persistence of patriarchal relations in non-capitalist societies;
4 feminist theory has questioned (in line with postmodernism), the Marxist claim to
be a single theory that can explain all aspects of society, including its history and
future.

Rethinking these basic categories of Marxist analysis, many feminists drawing

on critical theory have argued, however, that ‘in the context of a capitalism that has
become truly global, and in which ever more of life is commodified, much of Marx’s
critique of capitalism remains very apt’ (Hartsock, 1998, p. 401). Feminist critical
theorists tend to share in common with Marxism the contention that relations of sexual
difference are shaped primarily by the appropriation of labour, and also emphasise
the idea (known as ‘dialectics’) that the social world is composed not of ‘things’ but of

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processes – a perspective which holds that social phenomena must be understood

within the context of the social totality. This emphasis on the dialectical nature of
social reality is believed by some feminists to provide a more complex and sophis-
ticated understanding of the social world than is available from either liberal-humanism
(modernism) or theories associated with postmodernism. It also has important
implications for the ways in which power and knowledge are understood (see Chapter
13) within feminist critical theory, and for the ways in which the purpose and nature
of feminism itself is defined.
Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (1987, p. 1) outline what they term ‘feminism
as critique’, which represents an attempt to link a conception of the social world
(and our social identity) as dialectical, with a commitment to the idea that knowledge
and power are ‘situated’. This involves a theoretical shift in Marxist feminism, amount-
ing to what they term ‘the displacement of the paradigm of production’. The traditional
Marxist category of production involves an active subject transforming, making and
shaping an object (the product of labour). According to Benhabib and Cornell, this is
inadequate to understand much of the labour that women perform (both in the home
and in paid work) that involves not subject–object relations, but inter-subjective
relations. They also argue that the Marxist emphasis on production as the structuring
principle of society subsumes feminine categories and inter-subjective relations. For
Benhabib and Cornell, this model (and the public/private distinction on which it
depends) is detrimental to acknowledging the social significance of women’s labour,
and effectively trivialises women’s social and economic role.
As well as their critique of the Marxist paradigm of production, Benhabib and
Cornell reject the liberal-humanist conception of the ‘self’. They argue that the liberal
definition of the self as the bearer of certain rights and responsibilities is belied by the
inequality, asymmetry and domination which permeates the gendered identity of this
self. Feminist critical theory, or what they term ‘feminism as critique’ therefore involves
a critique of the postmodernist rejection of metanarratives, the Marxist paradigm
of production, and the liberal-humanist conception of the self.
In the main, feminist critical theorists are sceptical about the claims of post-
modernism and argue that the project of modernity (with its core concepts of progress,
humanity and liberation), despite its flaws, still contains considerable potential on
which to ground an emancipatory, feminist politics. But they also argue that we must
give more attention to gendered subjectivity, to the body and to language than has
traditionally been the case in (modernist) feminist theory and to begin to understand
the role of culture in perpetuating women’s oppression. Feminist critical theorists also
tend to reject the liberal-humanist (and also Marxist) conception of a core, essential
self in favour of a view of the self as the outcome of process. Theorists such as Benhabib
(1992, p. 213) argue that ‘one of the main consequences of the androcentric [male-
centred] conception of the universal subject has been to obscure the fact that men, too,
are gendered beings’. They argue that it is not an essential self that women are alienated
from (in the way that liberal, Marxist or radical feminists might), but from the process
of becoming a subject (that, for instance, dominant images of feminine bodies in the
mass media serve to define and constrain female embodiment within patriarchal and
capitalist norms, rather than enabling women to identify subjectively with their ‘lived’,
material bodies).

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Feminist critical theorists emphasise that the relationship of feminism to modernism

is one shaped by conflict and contradiction, but that, nevertheless, the future of femi-
nist theory lies in a critical continuation of modernism, not a rejection of it. Hence,
feminism is seen to constitute both a critique and a defence of modernist thinking.
Feminist critical theory also rejects the poststructuralist critique of metanarratives,
arguing that feminism needs to develop a theoretical framework that both recognises
the plurality of women’s experiences and perspectives, whilst also emphasising the
importance (politically and intellectually) of a commitment to solidarity, and to under-
standing shared experience; the latter is deemed to be based largely on the exploitation
of women’s labour. Feminist critical theorists are thus critical of the postmodernist
demand for an abandonment of the search for any certain or stable foundation for
knowledge, as this is thought to undermine, as Hartsock puts it, ‘the very real political
interests which underlie feminist theory, which are necessarily founded on the belief
that a feminist perspective is superior to a non-feminist perspective’ (1998, p. 403).
Feminist critical theorists believe, then, that it is possible for feminism to radically
challenge the core beliefs of modernism, whilst retaining a commitment to its political
impetus: ‘to reshape its categories of analysis without severing ties with its emancipatory
aspirations’ (Benhabib, 1995, p. 32).

Black and post-colonial feminisms

While Marxist, dual-systems and feminist critical theorists have all argued that it
is necessary to analyse and explain class, gender and racial subordination, Black
and post-colonial feminists have been critical of the lack of centrality given to issues
of ethnic difference, racialisation, colonialism and racism in feminist theory and
research. Here the term Black (with a capital ‘b’) is used to refer to a group of people
who have a subjective sense of belonging together not because of the colour of their
skin, but because of a shared experience of marginalisation, oppression and racial-
isation. This political (rather than racial) use of the term has been criticised, however,
particularly by post-colonial feminists who argue that it loses sight of important
differences in the experience (and causes) of racism, thereby homogenising diverse
identities and experiences. By ‘post-colonial’ we mean groups of people whose identity
is shaped, at least in part, by a shared history or experience of subjection to colonial
power, and often also to migration.
There has been a growing sociological interest in post-colonial studies in
recent years. Many would argue that this in itself represents merely another form
of colonisation. Others might argue, more optimistically perhaps, that this signifies
the extent to which the discipline (partly as a result of the impact of feminism, post-
modernism and post-colonialism) is becoming more reflexive. That is, more aware
of the ways in which sociology itself has perpetuated inequalities in power and
the marginalisation of particular groups of people. The sociological interest in post-
colonialism seems to have been fuelled by a growing awareness of the Eurocentrism
of the Enlightenment, and of the liberal traditions it engendered. The Enlightenment,
according to this outlook, actually perpetrated the interests of the few – European,
mostly white, men – in the name of a generic commitment to universal values such as
rationality, liberation, democracy, equal rights, and so on.

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Black and post-colonial feminists have argued that the universal claims of white
feminists do not provide adequate theoretical explanations for the unique experiences
and structural locations of Black and post-colonial women. They point out, for example,
that the relationship between white women and white men is not the same as that
between Black women and Black men. They do not deny that Black men oppress
Black women in patriarchal ways but argue that capitalism and patriarchy do not
distribute power evenly among Black and white men, so that there is often more
solidarity (in terms of shared experiences and interests) between white males and
females than there is between white males and Black males.
What the relatively disparate range of approaches to Black and post-colonial
feminist theory share in common is a critique of white mainstream, academic feminism.
As Beasley has put it,

The only assertion that is consistently reiterated within the field is the critique of
feminism as, at minimum, inattentive to race and ethnicity. More often feminism is
seen as being exclusionary and (either implicitly or explicitly) racist/ethnocentrist.
(Beasley, 1999, p. 104, original emphasis)

Broadly speaking, Black and post-colonial feminist theory has brought four particular
‘charges’ against mainstream, white feminism. These can be summed up as:

1 ethnocentrism,
2 the perpetuation of a ‘victim ideology’,
3 theoretical racism, and
4 cultural appropriation.

Ethnocentrism
Black and post-colonial feminists have argued that white feminism has ignored the
existence and specific experiences of Black women, and has over-homogenised
‘women’s experience’ derived from white perspectives and priorities. In particular,
radical feminists’ insistence that sexual oppression is the most fundamental form
of power and their related view that women have more in common with each other
than with any man is perceived as exemplifying authoritarian claims that Black and
post-colonial feminists refute. Rather, as Beasley notes,

Feminists concerned with race/ethnicity draw attention to the solidarity created

between men and women who experience racism/ethnocentrism and, in asserting
this commonality, they sometimes pose race/ethnicity as the more fundamental
form of power.
(Beasley, 1999, p. 111)

In this respect, white feminism is charged with being ethnocentric – based on

the perspective, experiences and priorities of one particular ethnic or racial group,
yet making statements about social reality that are claimed or assumed to be universal.
The claim that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America, or that Australia is a little

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over two hundred years old, is ethnocentric, for instance. Similarly, the feminist claim
that the family is one of the key sites of women’s oppression could be regarded as
ethnocentric, because it fails to take account of the diversity of experiences of family
life amongst women of different racial, ethnic and national identities. Women living in
post-colonial and developing countries particularly have challenged the assumption
that there is a generalisable, identifiable and collectively shared experience of
womanhood.

The perpetuation of a ‘victim ideology’

It is also argued by Black and post-colonial feminists that white, Western feminist
theory has tended to see Black and post-colonial women as the helpless victims of
racism (or simply of their racial, ethnic, cultural or religious identities), and so have
failed to take account of the complex interaction between race and sexual difference
in relation to cultural practices that are unfamiliar. In her book The Whole Woman,
Germaine Greer (1999) discusses some of the complex issues underpinning feminist
(and non-feminist) debates on clitoridectomy (referred to by radical feminists such as
Mary Daly as ‘genital mutilation’ – see above). Greer outlines how when she discussed
breast augmentation surgery with Somali women, many of whom had experienced
clitoridectomy themselves, they were horrified at the lengths women in the West would
go to mutilate their bodies in order to make themselves more sexually attractive to
men. Greer argues that this indicates the level of ethnocentrism underpinning the
‘victim ideologies’ at work in Western feminist thought. Other examples we might cite
are assumptions about dress codes and arranged marriages, for instance. As Jennifer
Saul (2003, p. 266) notes in her discussion of Western judgements about Islamic
women’s ‘veiling’ (itself a homogenising term that refers to a range of garments and
practices), veiling – although in many ways problematic – has historically been widely
‘misunderstood and oversimplified’ by Western feminists.

Theoretical racism
It is this lack of reflexivity that bell hooks (1982, 1984) is particularly critical of in
her evaluation of white feminism. She accuses feminist theory of racism, and argues
that in recent years a division has arisen in the ‘type’ of writing that feminists are
expected to produce. She argues that Black and post-colonial women are expected
to write ‘from the heart’ about their lived experiences, whereas white feminists are
expected to write ‘from the head’ and to provide theory according to which Black
women’s experiences can be analysed and explained. hooks argues that this racial/
epistemological division of feminism effectively reproduces the dichotomies of
modernist, patriarchal thought that feminism is supposed to challenge, and according
to which women’s experiences were understood with reference to the systems of
meaning produced by men.
Most Black and post-colonial feminists are highly critical, therefore, of the ways
in which feminist empirical, theoretical and political claims have been based largely
on the experiences of relatively affluent and privileged white, Western women. This
‘false universalism’, hooks argues, has been profoundly ethnocentric.

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Furthermore, Black and post-colonial feminists have argued that the customary
division of the history of feminism into ‘waves’ reflects the extent to which feminism
has tended to be constructed and organised with reference to North American and
European thought. Irene Gedalof (1999) in her book Against Purity has also developed
a critique of the ways in which white, Western feminism has tended to conceptualise
a focus solely (or even primarily) on gender as feminism in its ‘purest’ form. Her account
of Indian feminist theory shows how Indian feminist ideas and politics have evolved
alongside anti-colonial movements and within the context of Hindu/Muslim conflicts.
Thus, writers such as hooks and Gedalof have argued that, however unintentionally,
the ‘grand narrative’ of feminism becomes the story of Western feminist endeavours,
and tends to relegate the experience of non-Western women to the margins of feminist
theory.

Cultural appropriation
bell hooks (1992) has also been particularly critical of the ways in which, at the other
extreme and especially within popular culture, the experiences and identities of (or
rather attributed to) Black women have been appropriated by white women in the
name of feminism. Writing in the early 1990s, hooks has been particularly critical of
Madonna in this respect, but argues that much the same critique can be developed
of feminist theory. This, she argues, effectively amounts to a cultural (and material)
colonisation of Black and post-colonial women by white feminism. She also notes, in
this respect, how white feminism has often served not only to leave intact but often to
reinforce racist stereotypes of Black femininity. hooks (1992) argues, for instance, that
white feminist perceptions of Madonna as subversive fail to acknowledge that her
projection of aggressive sexual agency is scarcely of use to Black women who might
wish to challenge racist representations of themselves as explicitly and overly sexual.
In common with postmodernist feminism, then, many Black and post-colonial
feminists are committed to questioning universal assumptions about ‘womanhood’.
Both approaches are concerned with developing theory that avoids generalising
from the experiences of white, Western heterosexual, middle-class women. Indeed, it
may be argued that, as Chris Weedon (1997, p. 179) notes, ‘by questioning all essences
and relativising truth claims, postmodern feminisms create a space for political per-
spectives and interests that have hitherto been marginalised’. They also help guard
against creating alternative generalising theories in their place.
However, Black feminists such as bell hooks in particular – in their commitment
to racial as well as gender emancipation – do not abandon any sense of collective
politics. Rather, they argue that some notion of a shared experience of womanhood
remains politically necessary. In particular, bell hooks is concerned that postmodern-
ism may mean that feminism becomes overly preoccupied intellectually with
recognising and celebrating differences amongst women at the expense of maintaining
a commitment to emancipatory politics.
This dilemma leaves feminism with something of a theoretical (and a political)
problem – How can feminist theory base itself upon the uniqueness of women’s
experience of the social world, without reifying one particular definition or description
of what that experience is; without succumbing, in other words, to universal claims

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about women’s position? Postmodernism, Black and post-colonial feminisms all raise
fundamental questions for feminist theory about the nature and role of feminism itself.
The current stress on diversity amongst women complicates the question ‘What is
feminism?’ and particularly ‘Who is feminism trying to emancipate?’ This complexity
has led some feminists to argue that we now live in what should be regarded as a post-
feminist era.

Postfeminism

Sarah Gamble sums up some of the issues raised by postfeminism when she notes
that

‘postfeminism’ is a term that is very much in vogue these days. In the context
of popular culture it’s the Spice Girls, Madonna and the Girlie Show: women
dressing like bimbos, yet claiming male privileges and attitudes. Meanwhile, those
who wish to maintain an allegiance to more traditional forms of feminism circle
around the neologism warily, unable to decide whether it represents a con trick
engineered by the media or a valid movement.
(Gamble, 2001, p. 43)

Indeed, as Gamble goes on to note, many feminist and sociological texts tend
to barricade the term in inverted commas ‘thus keeping both author and reader at a
properly skeptical distance’ (p. 43). For many feminists, postfeminism is best under-
stood not as something that comes after feminism but rather as a regressive
development – as a perspective that ‘delivers us back’ as Tania Modleski (1991) has
put it. Perhaps the most clearly articulated discussion of postfeminism as a relapse
can be found in Susan Faludi’s (1991) Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women.
For Faludi, postfeminism – which she defines as an ironic, pseudo-intellectual critique
of the feminist movement – is a backlash against the achievements of second wave
feminism. She notes how, in a society in which we define ourselves largely with
reference to media culture (see Chapter 12), women are easily persuaded that feminism
is passé.
Although for some, postfeminism engenders scepticism, for others, it represents
something much more liberatory and an opportunity to throw off the stifling shackles
of an ethnocentric and anachronistic movement. Much of this latter approach
coalesces around a liberal ideology of individualism and a rejection of what is perceived
as a victim mentality within second wave feminism. In The Morning After: Sex, Fear and
Feminism, for instance, Katie Roiphe (1993) argues that the feminist perpetuation of
an image of women as victims of their gender and sexuality transports us back to
the ideas of earlier generations that framed women as delicate and in need of protec-
tion – ideas that both first and second wave feminism fought hard against. In a similar
vein, Rene Denfeld’s (1995) The New Victorians emphasises that the term ‘feminism’
has come to stand for an extremist movement that valorises what she calls ‘the figure
of the female victim’. She concludes that feminism is becoming a spent force – one that
has lost credibility in the eyes of those whose real social and political inequality still

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needs to be addressed. As she puts it, ‘trapped in a stagnant, alienating ideology, the
only thing most of the feminist movement is heading toward is complete irrelevance’
(cited in Gamble, 2001, p. 47).
In parallel with trends in the development of postmodern thought, perspectives
on postfeminism can broadly be categorised as those that stress either post-feminism
as a socio-cultural phenomenon, characterised by the emergence of an historical
period ‘after’ feminism, and postfeminism as a theoretical perspective concerned to
emphasise diversity rather than commonality of experience amongst women (and
men), and therefore the extent to which a coherent feminist theory is no longer tenable.
Indeed, the postmodernist claim that there is nothing stable or universal – definitive –
in the category woman effectively implies that there can be no subject of feminism. As
Beasley has noted in this respect, postmodernist feminism

may be said to offer the greatest challenge to feminism yet given . . . feminists’
concerns with the subject of ‘woman’, a concern which places centre stage women
as a category or group identified by sex differentiation.
(Beasley, 1999, p. 83)

Post-feminism as an historical period

The term post-feminism (with a hyphen) tends to be used largely by those who argue
that the political demands of first and second wave feminism have now been met
(enfranchisement, equal pay, sexual liberation, and so on) and that it is time for men
and women to compete on a level playing field. Many such writers claim that to
prolong feminism as a political project would be socially regressive and politically
divisive (and that, as a result, men would become an oppressed minority). Hall and
Rodriguez (2003, p. 878) have recently outlined four claims made by post-feminists.
These are ‘(1) overall support for the women’s movement has dramatically eroded
because some women (2) are increasingly antifeminist, (3) believe the movement is
irrelevant, and (4) have adopted a “no, but . . .” version of feminism’. Helen Wilkinson
(1994) in her account of what she terms ‘the genderquake’ argues that

1 the cultural, political and economic enfranchisement of women is deep and

irreversible (there has been a convergence of the values of men and women);
2 most of the jobs created in market societies in the last thirty years or so have been
in so-called ‘women’s work’ (non-manual, service sector work – see Chapter 9);
3 conversely, construction, manufacturing and the military (traditionally sectors of
large male employment) have contracted;
4 the terms of the feminist debate have shifted – sociologists now acknowledge that
men as well as women can be subject to discrimination, harassment and inter-
personal violence;
5 feminist politics is severely lacking behind culture (most young women don’t identify
themselves as ‘feminist’, although they may have sympathy with many of the
empirical, political and theoretical claims of feminism);
6 there are major generation gaps between women (many of the current generation
now take for granted what previous generations struggled for);

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7 a new agenda for feminism is needed if it is to survive in any useful form into the
twenty-first century.

One of the most identifiable ‘faces’ of postfeminism as a period ‘after’ or opposed

to feminism, particularly in the USA, is Naomi Wolf. In her book Fire With Fire (1993),
Wolf argues that feminism has consistently failed to capitalise on its gains and to
be more reflexive about how far it has come. For Wolf, power is there ‘for the taking’
and she urges women to be more proactive in this respect, and to reject the feminist
perpetuation of a victim ideology. As Gamble (2001) notes, perhaps power really
is there ‘for the taking’ if one is a white, middle-class, educated and relatively wealthy
American; but what if you are Black, or poor, or subject to an oppressive political,
military or religious regime? These are things that Wolf tends not to consider, an
omission which we could argue highlights many of the problems associated with
the claim that postfeminism is a socio-cultural phenomenon – a historical period after
or opposed to feminism.
In her book The Whole Woman, Germaine Greer (1999) argues that the claim that
we live in a post-feminist era is little more than a marketing strategy, for ‘the most
powerful entities on earth are not governments, but the multi-national corporations that
see women as their territory’. The idea that (as Naomi Wolf emphasises) women can
‘have it all’, for Greer, serves merely to reinforce women’s role as the world’s foremost
consumers of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, clothing, cosmetic surgery and convenience
foods. Greer also argues that the adoption of a post-feminist stance is a Western luxury
– much like other consumer goods – one that only the world’s most affluent women
can indulge in, and that by taking power for themselves in the way that Naomi Wolf
advocates, (male and female) champions of post-feminism merely perpetuate the
oppression of others.

Postfeminism as a theoretical perspective

As Sarah Gamble (2001, p. 50) has argued, postfeminism is more convincing when
it is developed as a theoretical approach (as opposed to an empirical claim): ‘in this
context, postfeminism becomes a pluralistic epistemology dedicated to disrupting
universalizing patterns of thought, and [is] thus capable of being aligned with post-
modernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism.’ As a theoretical perspective
(as opposed to an empirical claim), postfeminism implies that given the diversity of
womanhood it is problematic to assume that feminism is based on a unified subjectivity
(as in the idea of a ‘universal sisterhood’, for instance), so that if there is no universal
‘woman’ as the subject of feminism, it is logical to argue that contemporary theories
of sexual difference are ‘postfeminist’. This raises the question of what we mean by
‘post’. In terms of post-feminism as a political or historical phenomenon, the term
tends to be used to signify a period that comes after (or instead of) feminism. In relation
to postfeminism as a theoretical perspective, a shift in feminist thinking is implied, and
particularly in the way in which ‘woman’ as the subject of feminism is conceptualised.
A notable example of this approach is Ann Brooks’s (1997) Postfeminisms:
Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms. Brooks argues that feminism tends to

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base its claim to equality on an appeal to the liberal humanism of Enlightenment

modernity, a claim that postfeminism seeks to destabilise, focusing instead on the
ideological processes through which women were excluded from the (European)
Enlightenment. According to Brooks, postfeminism signals the development of an
exciting and dynamic intellectual debate within feminism – over equality and difference,
commonality and diversity, for instance – one invigorated by the various contributions
of postmodern, Black and post-colonial theorists.
Indeed many of those writers considered above tend to reject the label ‘feminist’
altogether, arguing that feminism is a political movement that is liberal-humanist in
its orientation and which seeks to obtain a place for women as men’s equals in a
patriarchal culture. Instead of becoming feminists, Hélène Cixous argues, women
should strive to disrupt the established gender order. Julia Kristeva similarly refutes
the term feminist, and particularly a feminist conception of ‘woman’ which, she argues,
has traditionally sought merely to replicate men’s power within established patriarchal
structures. She refers to liberal, Anglo-American feminism as ‘bourgeois’ and therefore
not representative of the politics of the feminine.
In terms of the relationship between race, ethnicity and postfeminism, the
influence of post-colonial theory is important to consider. On the one hand, while
white feminism has claimed to have theorised the colonisation of all women who are
subject to patriarchal oppression, feminists such as bell hooks (1982, 1984, 1990) and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1987) have found this problematic in so far as it ignores
specific cultural and material conditions experienced by Black and post-colonial
women, in favour of an emphasis on the politics of ‘universal sisterhood’. Post-
modernism’s emphasis on diversity – as this manifests itself in postfeminism as a
theoretical disposition – is thus welcomed.
On the other hand, however, post-feminism as a political term (signifying
an empirical-historical rather than theoretical shift) tends to be rejected by Black and
post-colonial feminists as lacking concrete relevance to ‘real’ (material) conditions
of marginality experienced by Black and post-colonial women; and therefore as being
exclusionary and ethnocentric in its focus. bell hooks in particular has been critical of
post-feminism for embracing the ‘death of the subject’ thesis in postmodernist thinking,
just when Black and post-colonial feminists were beginning to claim a strong presence
in feminist theory.
As well as debates on gender relations, postmodernism, and race and ethnicity,
postfeminism is also implicated in feminist debates on the impact of recent develop-
ments in media and communication technologies (see Chapter 12). In her ‘Cyborg
Manifesto’, Donna Haraway (1991) argues that there is nothing inherently female
that binds all women together, there is not even such a state as being universally
‘female’ – itself, she argues, a category constructed within scientific discourse and
other social practices that define patriarchy. Haraway argues that women should
learn to embrace and control technology rather than (continue to) allow it to control
them; hence her approach has been termed ‘cyberfeminism’ – a postfeminist (or third
wave feminist) approach that celebrates the evolution of cyber-reality as an alternative
gender order.
In a similar vein to Haraway, Sadie Plant (1997) has argued that women must
embrace developments in media and communication technologies. Forms of com-

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munication such as hypertext, Plant claims, are non-linear and thus more ‘female’ in
their orientation. She argues that in terms of communication, women can celebrate
their femininity in a cyber-reality in which disembodied beings can conceive of gender
identity as one option amongst many, and her work too has been referred to as
‘postfeminist’ or cyberfeminist. She maintains that the evolution of cybernetics marks
a fundamental shift away from a linear (modernist) conception of development, and
a return to a (pre-modern) cyclical reality ‘now transformed into circuitry’ (p. 507) that
resonates more closely with women’s experiences of reality. She contends that we
are heading towards a post-human world in which the intentions of ‘man’ as the author
of the human species are no longer the guiding force of global development; a (post-
gendered) era in which cyberfeminism can flourish.
Not surprisingly, then, postmodern and cyberfeminists tend to regard identity
politics (for instance, the radical feminist conception of a ‘universal sisterhood’) with
some disdain. They insist that resistance to male power does not have to involve
recourse to accepting what has traditionally been defined as ‘womanhood’, and thus
refuse to valorise or celebrate (in the gynocentric way that some radical feminists do)
any notion of an essential identity supposedly shared by all women. Hence, because
of their rejection of any unitary, stable notion of the subject, and their related scepticism
regarding emancipatory politics and metanarratives, some postmodern and cyber-
feminists urge the abandonment of engagement with any form of identity politics
or patriarchal discourse, and include feminism within that category. As Weedon notes
in this respect, however,

How . . . could women organize together and develop new positive identities if
there were no essence of womanhood on the basis of which women could come
together in the spirit of sisterhood? This question has become central to feminism.
(Weedon, 1997, p. 170)

We would argue that the competing feminist theories considered here ask different
questions and thereby provide different understandings of the social world, and of
relations of sexual difference. Rather than argue that one is more adequate than
the others, we would suggest that all feminist ideas contribute to our understanding
and help us make sense of the social world; each adds something to the process of
gendering the sociological imagination.

Conclusions

In this chapter we have argued that malestream sociology has failed to develop
theories that can make sense of the social world for women. Furthermore, there has
been a resistance to taking account of the critique of malestream theory that has been
developed by feminist sociologists. We have indicated that feminists have developed
a number of theoretical perspectives that provide a basis both for making sense of
what is going on in the social world and for political action – for challenging and
changing patriarchy in all its guises. These provide the basis for developing a sociology
for women, one that provides an understanding of the social world that speaks to the
experiences of women – a gendered ‘sociological imagination’.

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SUMMARY

1 Sociology as a discipline is concerned with enabling us to understand

the social world we inhabit and our position within it – to grasp the
sociological imagination.
2 Feminist sociologists wish to reformulate sociology so that it provides
a sociological imagination for women as well as men, something that
malestream sociology has failed to do as sociological theory remains
largely male dominated.
3 Sociology is concerned to develop theories in order to provide answers
to ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions.
4 Sociologists disagree both on what it is that is being explained and on
how it can be explained. We outlined four theoretical positions on social
reality – positivist, idealist, realist and postmodernist.
5 Sexual difference – the difference between men and women as social
subjects – is central to feminist theory and feminists have devised four
main ways in which sexual difference can be understood. These are –
humanist, gynocentric, postmodernist and critical feminist.
6 There are a number of feminist theories, which differ in the ways in
which they explain inequalities based on sexual difference, and on the
emancipatory strategies they advocate. Those that have had the most
significant impact on sociology to date include – liberal/reformist,
Marxist, radical, dual-systems, postmodern, feminist critical theory and
Black/post-colonial feminism.
7 Post-feminism is both an empirical claim and a theoretical disposition
that, along with cyberfeminism, raises interesting and potentially
problematic issues for feminism.

FURTHER READING

Evans, J. (1995) Feminist Theory Today: An Introduction to Second Wave Feminism. London: Sage.
This book is a useful starting point – it is an accessible guide to a range of feminist perspectives
and debates and is particularly useful for its outline of feminist perspectives on sexual difference.
Saul, J.M. (2003) Feminism: Issues and Arguments. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This is a
stimulating book for anyone with an interest in feminist theory and particularly the philosophical
issues underpinning feminist debates on identity and difference. It explores the politics of work
and family, sexual harassment, pornography, abortion, issues relating to feminine appearance,
feminism and language, science and also feminist debates on culture.
Tong, R. (1998) Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction. Second edition. London:
Routledge. This is a comprehensive and engaging outline of a range of feminist theoretical
perspectives, focusing on their historical development and including close textual readings.
It is a useful follow-on from any of the other more introductory texts.

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CHAPTER THREE

Stratification and inequality

In all societies there are differences between people in terms of the amount of power
and wealth they command. In this chapter we discuss various social and cultural
divisions, considering the main forms of social stratification in the contemporary world
and exploring how these might be explained from a feminist perspective. Focusing
initially on gender and then social class, we also look at racial and ethnic divisions,
as well as feminist contributions to sociological perspectives on disability. Finally, we
examine global patterns of stratification and the ways in which these are shaped by
sexual difference (the difference between men and women). This is not to say, however,
that issues of identity, difference and inequality are not considered in subsequent
chapters. What we are aiming to do here is merely map out a conceptual and empirical
framework by exploring sociological and feminist perspectives on aspects of identity
and difference that shape men’s and women’s experiences of the social world, and
particularly of social stratification.
Sociologists use the term stratification to refer to a structure according to which
individuals and groups are positioned within a social hierarchy in which some groups
occupy more powerful and privileged positions than others – in a class, caste or gender
system, for instance. Macionis and Plummer (2002) argue that social stratification is:

1 a characteristic of society – not simply a reflection of individual differences or

competences;
2 persistent over generations (although some individuals do experience social mobility
– see below);
3 universal but variable – stratification is a feature of all societies from the simplest
to the most complex, but what counts as inequality varies between and also within
societies;
4 not simply material but also based on belief systems – just as what constitutes inequality
varies between societies, so do explanations of why people are unequal, as does the
basis on which people might come to be thought of as inferior.

The basis of stratification – the division of people according to a hierarchical

system – varies from society to society. Divisions may be based on sexual difference,
social class, race and ethnicity, culture, disability, age, and so on. Feminist writer Iris
Marion Young (1990a, pp. 49–59) has identified a number of social processes at work
in the stratification of societies into hierarchical orders. These include:

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1 social exclusion and marginalisation – a process by which ‘a whole category of people

is expelled from useful participation in social life’;
2 exploitation – through which there is ‘a transfer of the results of the labour of one
social group to benefit another’;
3 powerlessness – whereby ‘people come to lack the authority, status and sense of self
that many professionals tend to have’;
4 cultural imperialism – involving ‘the universalization of a dominant group’s
experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm’;
5 violence – directed at members of a group simply because they belong to that group
(examples of which might include violence against women, racial violence and
homophobia).

Sociologists have tended to argue that in capitalist societies the primary form
of stratification is based on social class. However, sociologists disagree about what
constitutes class, and how it is determined. Some argue, for instance, that countries
such as Britain and the US are increasingly ‘classless’. Others emphasise that class
is no longer defined by production (the occupational group to which we belong, or
by our income) but by consumption (our spending patterns and the kind of lifestyle we
adopt). Most sociologists maintain, however, that

Capitalist industrial societies are still stratified, and theories of social class
still provide us with essential insights into the manner in which established in-
equalities in wealth and power associated with production and markets, access
to educational and organisational resources and so on have systematically served
to perpetuate these inequalities over time.
(Crompton, 1993, p. 266)

However, class processes are not the only factors contributing to the reproduction and
maintenance of social inequalities. As we have seen in Chapter 2, feminists argue that
sexual difference is also a primary form of stratification, with men having more power
and prestige than women in most societies. Racial and ethnic differences are likewise
a primary determinant of stratification. One feature of Indian society, for instance,
despite attempts by some Hindu reformers to outlaw it, is the caste structure. This is
a system of stratification based on inherited or ascribed social status premised on the
assumption that hierarchy is, at least in part, natural or pre-social – part of the divine
intention for natural order. Social groups or ‘castes’ are defined primarily by birth, but
also by marriage and occupation.
Today, caste barriers have largely broken down in urban areas of India, and
‘untouchability’ – the idea that some groups are too low to be categorised within
the caste system – has been abolished by law. However, the Jati (modern caste) system
continues to emphasise the importance of rituals of purity and impurity. Hence,
members of the upper castes tend to consider the lower castes to be ritually ‘unclean’,
and so marrying someone from a lower caste, for instance, whilst not officially out-
lawed, might not be recognised or celebrated. Loyalty to a caste continues to provide
a strong sense of belonging and constitutes a significant aspect of social identity and
stratification in Indian society, particularly in rural areas.

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Age is also a significant aspect of social stratification, with young people and
elderly ones generally having less power than those in middle-aged groups. Although
the proportion varies between countries, there are more women than men amongst
the elder populations of most societies, with the largest differences being in Eastern
European and Central Asian countries (see Chapter 5). Since women are more likely
than men to become widowed or live alone, they are more vulnerable to social inequal-
ities resulting from changes in population structure and inadequate social welfare
provision. Also, since women are more likely to be disadvantaged in the labour market
(see Chapter 9), to undertake informal and unpaid caring activities, and because they
tend to lack social security and pension rights relative to men, they are more vulnerable
to poverty than men in later life.
Patterns of global stratification are also important to consider. The division
between the West (the advanced industrial societies) and the Rest, to use a distinction
made by Stuart Hall (1992a), also involves a relationship of exploitation and sub-
ordination as post-colonial sociologists and feminists have argued.
It is also important to recognise therefore that while all societies are divided
according to sexual difference, women are not a unified and homogeneous group and
may experience inequalities based on sexual difference in a range of ways. They share
a subject position (as women) but are differentiated by age, sexual preference, race,
class, physicality and geopolitical status. As we noted in Chapter 2, white, Western,
middle-class varieties of feminist theory and practice are increasingly coming
to be challenged as ignoring the experiences of many women. Postmodernist and
post-colonial feminists have highlighted the dangers of inappropriate generalisation,
stressing the importance of acknowledging the many voices and experiences of
women. Postfeminists have also argued that because womanhood is such a diverse
experience and identity, it makes no sense to continue to speak of – and attempt
to emancipate – women as a homogenous group.
While it is important to recognise the different interests of women situated in terms
of class, race, age, and so on, other feminists (e.g. Doyal, 1995) have warned of the
dangers of doing so, arguing that in rejecting general categories we may lose sight of
the commonalities between women. Lesley Doyal points out that the body, for example,
imposes real (material) constraints on women’s lives and that ‘this is evidenced by
the fact that the fight for bodily self-determination has been a central feature of femi-
nist politics across very different cultures’ (p. 7). We would agree with this position,
and argue that whilst it is important to recognise the diverse range of experiences and
identities within womanhood and avoid making universalising or ethnocentric claims,
feminism must also emphasise commonalities amongst women, particularly in terms
of shared experiences of oppression, exploitation and marginalisation.

Gender-based stratification

The distinction between men and women, masculine and feminine, is a fundamental
basis of social and cultural organisation and a primary form of stratification, femi-
nists argue. Common sense suggests that becoming a man or a woman is a linear
process of ‘natural’ development, but sociologists have long since argued otherwise,

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maintaining that differences between men and women are not ahistorical, absolute or
universal but historically and culturally variable. Bob Connell (1995, 2002), for instance,
has argued that in any given societies there are a range of masculinities and that only
some of these become dominant – defining the most socially acceptable ways of being
a man, and hence assuming the status of what he terms ‘hegemonic masculinity’.
Sociological perspectives on gender therefore aim to understand the key social
differences between men and women and attempt to explain these with reference to
social (rather than biological or psychological) differences. These differences are often
referred to as the ‘gender order’ – the structure through which men and women, as well
as forms of masculinity and femininity, are accorded different levels of power and
status in any given society.

Gender inequalities

Gender differences are evident throughout the social world and are grounded in
relations of power and inequality because in most societies men are accorded a dis-
proportionate share of social, political, economic and cultural resources. Gender
inequalities, much like the other forms of social stratification considered here, are
both cultural and material – women are marginalised not only in cultural beliefs,
representations and practices (in language, for instance – see Chapter 12), but are also
oppressed and exploited through political, economic, social and physical forms
of power. The following examples from current research give some indication of the
nature and extent of gender discrimination and disadvantage across the world, or what
sociologist Goran Therborn (2004, p. 107) calls ‘the patriarchal burden of the twenty-
first century’.
In contemporary India, two rapes and three kidnapping and abduction cases
involving women are reported to the police every hour. Similarly, every hour at least
four molestation and one sexual harassment cases are reported. A study conducted
on behalf of UNICEF in Bangalore on the ways in which the police respond to reports
of crimes against women and children found that most of the cases reported were
not registered and instead, victims were often subject to police harassment in the name
of ‘counselling’. Cruelty to women by husbands and their relatives was also found
to be occurring at a rate of six cases every hour. Another finding was that among the
rape cases reported, 84 per cent of the offenders were known to the victims (The Hindu,
2 March 2004). One dowry death is reported in India every hour. Indeed, Therborn
(2004, p. 173) notes that in the first half of the 1990s, dowry conflicts led to 5,000
registered killings of women each year in India, with a heavy concentration in the
conservative northern states of Uttar Predesh and Harayana, and in the federal district
of Delhi (see also Thakur, 1998).
In Australia, the first national survey of sexual harassment has recently found that
more than one in four women have been harassed at work. Twenty years after the first
laws against sexual harassment were introduced there, some 28 per cent of women
aged 18–64 said they had been sexually harassed at work. The figure for men was
found to be 7 per cent. The survey also found that less than a third of those harassed
had reported the offence, and more than half said they lacked faith in the system.
Almost half of all those who had been harassed said their harasser was a co-worker,

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but 35 per cent said it was a supervisor or boss. In half of the reported cases, the
harassment had continued for more than six months (The Age, 25 March 2004).
A report by the UN (2004) entitled ‘Millennium Development Goals: China’s
Progress’ found that many Chinese women and girls face widespread discrimina-
tion and oppression in all spheres of life. The report estimates that 13 per cent of the
country’s 600 million women are illiterate, compared to only 5 per cent of men, and
only 22 per cent of the country’s government and public bodies are women. Women
in China are 25 per cent more likely to commit suicide compared to men and
women in the rest of the world, where on average 3.6 times more men kill themselves
than women. The report recommends that China includes gender and discrimination
issues in teacher training programmes and in school textbooks, and enforces measures
to reduce incentives for pre-natal sex selection (China News, 26 March 2004). Indeed,
the latter has become a particular social problem in China as official statistics suggest
that in 2002, there were 117 boys born for every 100 girls (in 1982, the proportion
of males to females was 108 to 100, closer to the worldwide ratio of 111.9 to 100). If
this trend continues, there will be up to 40 million more men than women in China by
2020. Although the law prohibits doctors from revealing the results of ultrasound
screening of embryos, in practice this is often ignored and abortion of female foetuses
is not uncommon since the introduction of China’s ‘one child per couple’ policy in
1979. Many baby girls are abandoned at hospitals and birth centres, and girls are over-
represented in Chinese orphanages (United Press International, 8 March 2004).

Structuralist explanations

Feminist sociologists such as Sylvia Walby (1990) have argued that gender inequalities
such as these are sustained through a range of social structures that subordinate
women. The term ‘patriarchy’ has been used in this respect both to describe and
to explain gender stratification. Patriarchy literally means ‘rule of the father’, and has
traditionally been used in English-speaking societies to refer to a household headed
by a male. As Beechey (1987) points out, its use in analysing gender inequalities is
not new – the term patriarchy was deployed by early feminist writers such as Virginia
Woolf and Vera Brittain, as well as by Weber to refer to a system of government
in which men ruled societies through their position as heads of household. Sociologists
such as Walby have used the term to refer to a much broader form of social organ-
isation in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women in a whole range of social
settings. As we noted in Chapter 2, for Walby, patriarchy in contemporary capitalist
societies consists of six interrelated structures or systems. These are:

1 paid employment – in most societies women are likely to be paid less than men;
2 household production – women are largely responsible for domestic labour and
childcare;
3 the state – women are much less likely than men to have direct access to political
power or representation;
4 violence – women are much more likely than men to be the subject of physical,
emotional and/or sexual abuse;

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5 sexuality – women are more likely than men to be sexually commodified or

objectified, and to be controlled through their sexuality;
6 culture – women more than men are under-represented or misrepresented in media
and popular culture.

For Walby, these structures are dynamically interrelating in so far as changes in

one of the components of patriarchy will cause changes in the others, and in the nature
and extent of gender stratification. While some degree of patriarchy may be universal,
there is of course significant variation in the relative power of men and women in
different parts of the world. In Southeast Asian countries and those in the Middle East
such as Saudi Arabia for instance, men’s control over women in all of the six structures
Walby identifies suggests that these are highly patriarchal societies. The least patri-
archal societies appear to be Scandinavian ones such as Norway and Sweden, in which
men and women seem to occupy much more equal positions within paid employment
and household production (www.un.org).
The term ‘patriarchy’ and its use in feminist sociology has not been unproblematic,
however, and it is fair to say that there remains some unease about its usefulness as
a conceptual tool. This is not least because it is such a homogenising term that does
not adequately enable us to understand the causal elements that make up patterns of
gender inequalities. In this sense, Crompton and Sanderson (1990) see the concept as
an ‘imperfect but descriptive’ tool.
Some sociologists have been particularly critical of the arbitrary exercise of
dividing patriarchy up into the six structures outlined above, and have described the
way in which Walby uses the term as ‘abstract structuralism’ that merges explanation
with description (see Pollert, 1996). Others have noted that its use tends towards a
biologically deterministic and ahistorical analysis of gender inequalities (Barrett, 1980;
Rowbotham, 1981). Other criticisms have been levelled against its insensitivity to
the experiences of women of different cultures, classes and ethnicities (hooks, 1984;
Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1993). In responding to these criticisms writers such as
Walby (1997) and also Witz (1992) tend to take the view that the concept can have
explanatory potential if used in a historically and culturally sensitive way.
Other sociologists who use the term have attempted to qualify its descriptive use
by distinguishing, for instance, between ‘post’ and ‘neo’ forms of patriarchy. Therborn
(2004), for example, argues that most Western societies underwent a process of
‘de-patriarchalization’ throughout the course of the twentieth century, coupled with a
shift towards secularisation and democratisation. These societies, he argues, have
effectively become post-patriarchal in so far as most adults are relatively autonomous
from their parents and enjoy (at least formally) equal male–female social rights. He
acknowledges however that although ‘a post-patriarchal society gives men and women
equal rights to act, . . . their relative income taps their ability to act’ (p. 127). He also
argues that there are several areas of the world – that he calls ‘neo-patriarchal’ – where
patriarchy is still firmly entrenched: South, Central and West Asia; and Northern,
sub-Saharan and West Africa. The latter, he argues, is ‘the region of the world where
the confrontations between modernist thrusts to de-patriarchalization and religiously
grounded patriarchal counter-blasts have been most violent’ (p. 112).

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Poststructuralist explanations

Many sociologists and feminist theorists, particularly those influenced by post-

modernism (see Chapter 2), have challenged structuralist approaches, such as Walby’s,
or ‘institutional’ perspectives, such as Therborn’s, on the grounds that they tend merely
to replace biological determinism with social determinism; emphasising an ontology
(theory of existence) of gender as something that is imposed on us, or ‘done’ to us by
patriarchal social structures. Instead of a structuralist approach to understanding
gender stratification, such feminists highlight the extent to which power is embedded
in everyday practices and relationships at every level of society and not simply in
particular social structures. This more poststructuralist approach to gender emphasises
the extent to which sexual difference is socially shaped and constantly renegotiated
in a wide variety of social settings.
Whereas social interactionists such as Goffman have long since argued that social
identities are merely performances, and that we perform different ‘roles’ according
to our audience and script, feminists such as Judith Butler (1990) have argued that our
gender identities are merely performative; that, as she puts it, ‘there is no doer behind
the deed’ or actor behind the action. For those who adopt this perspective, sex and
gender are much more fluid and flexible than the sex–gender distinction developed
by Oakley (see Chapter 1), and the structuralist approaches to gender stratification
developed by Walby and others, seem to suggest. Butler (2000), for instance, argues
that there is a ‘heterosexual matrix’ – a sex–gender order – operating in contemporary
societies that organises sexual difference as shown in Table 3.1:

Table 3.1 Sex–gender order

Sex Gender Sexuality

Male Masculine Heterosexual (active)

Female Feminine Heterosexual (passive)

Source: Butler, 2000

Butler argues that this heterosexual matrix serves to define what is ‘natural’ and
‘normal’ in any given society; the assumption being that a ‘normal’ male will be
masculine and heterosexually active, and that a ‘normal’ female will be feminine and
heterosexually passive. She argues that this matrix distorts the similarities and differ-
ences both between and amongst men and women, resulting in gender inequalities
(such as those considered above) and the devaluation of femininity, and invites us
to make what she calls ‘gender trouble’ (Butler, 2000) – to play with what is socially
defined as normal in gender terms. From this perspective, gender is seen as something
that we do, rather than an identity that is imposed on us by social structures – an
experience that varies considerably according to age, ethnicity, sexuality, embodiment,
social class, and so on.
Other feminists have been concerned, however, about the political implications
of poststructuralist approaches to gender stratification, arguing that emphasising
diversity amongst women, as well as advocating the need for irony and making ‘gender

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trouble’ (Butler, 2000), might result in undermining the category ‘woman’. This is of
concern because feminists are looking for their identity as women to be socially,
economically and politically valued. Nevertheless, this ‘doing gender’ approach is
particularly useful in emphasising that gender stratification cannot be adequately
understood solely as a single hierarchical division between men and women. As Sue
Lees (1993) points out, relationships between men and women are not static, but
constantly changing; although gender remains an important element of stratification
most feminists would argue. The opportunities available to men and women remain
unequal in most societies, but are not fixed. Women are able to exercise agency, but
this agency is constrained, we would argue, by structures and dominant discourses
so that women’s ‘choices’ are relatively limited. Many women might ‘choose’ to work
part-time for instance (see Chapters 6 and 9), but this choice is exercised within a
relatively narrow structural context and is shaped by factors such as the lack of state-
funded/provided childcare in most societies.

Social class-based stratification

As we noted above, in all complex societies there is an unequal distribution of material

and symbolic resources, resulting in economic and social inequality. Inequalities in
contemporary Western societies are generally regarded, by malestream sociologists,
as being based not primarily on sexual difference, but on social class – on production,
distribution and exchange. In this respect, class-based stratification and inequality, as
well as social mobility, continues to be a central theme particularly in British sociology.
Feminist sociologists in the UK and elsewhere have been strongly influenced by
Joan Acker’s (1973) critique of sociological research on class stratification. Following
Acker, three particular issues have concerned feminist analyses of social class in the
last thirty years or so. Sara Delamont frames these as three rhetorical questions:

First, was it sensible to treat the household as the unit of analysis, with its class
location treated as that of the male head? Second, were the very categories of
occupation, which were used to group occupations together into classes, inherently
sexist? Third, what empirical and theoretical insights would result if women were
treated as having their own occupationally based class identity and therefore their
own social mobility?
(Delamont, 2003, pp. 52–53)

These feminist interests have developed alongside a series of debates in malestream

sociology about the changing nature of social class and about the role of class analysis
in sociology (see Savage, 2000) but, as we noted in Chapter 1, have had a relatively
limited impact on the malestream core of the discipline.

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Sociological analysis and social class

Debates surrounding whether the household should persist as the central unit
of analysis came to prominence in the UK after the publication of the results of the
Nuffield mobility study in 1980 (Goldthorpe et al., 1980; Halsey et al., 1980). This project
had collected data on social mobility since 1972 based on an all-male sample in
England and Wales. During the 1980s a debate took place between Goldthorpe and
a range of sociologists critical of his methodology and the assumptions underpinning
it (Goldthorpe, 1983, 1984; Stanworth, 1983). Goldthorpe remained confident that the
male was the head of household and that his occupation determined the class position
of the family, even in households in which women also engaged in paid work. As
Delamont (2003) notes, however, there may be sociologically interesting differences
between, for example, ‘A household where the man was a doctor and the woman a
secretary compared to a household where both adults were doctors, or one where the
man was a routine clerical worker and the woman a doctor’ (p. 53).
As well as methodological disputes, one of the main problems in developing a
feminist-infused class analysis within sociology is that, as Rosemary Crompton (1993)
has pointed out, there are a number of different ways in which the term ‘class’ is used,
both by sociologists and in everyday discourse:

1 to refer to groups, ranked in a hierarchy, which are formally unequal and have
legally defined rights;
2 to refer to groups ranked according to social standing or prestige;
3 to refer to structural inequalities – to the unequal resourcing of groups – which are
the outcomes of competition for social resources in capitalist societies;
4 to refer to actual or potential social forces competing for control over scarce
resources.

We could also argue that the term class also refers to the cultural values, dispositions
and lifestyles attributed to those occupying distinct social positions. In this sense, class
is used to refer not simply to economic resources but also to ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu,
1984) acquired through education, socialisation and participation in particular social
networks. Of course, cultural and economic capital are closely related in so far as a
person who is deemed to be socially and culturally skilled is more likely to succeed
materially in a competitive, market society – in the labour market, for example.
Sociologists make use of virtually all these meanings of the term in their research; a
person’s social class is regarded as a summary variable which tells us about attitudes
and values, standards of living, levels of education, consumer behaviour, and so on.
Sociological research has shown that social class is an important determinant of life
chances in terms of education and health, for instance.
In Western sociology particularly, two main theories of social class dominate:
those based on Marxist theory (emphasising the centrality of the economic), and those
based on Weberian theory (emphasising the relationship between economic, social and
political status). These are often referred to as neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian, to
indicate that the basic ideas of Marx and Weber have been developed into theories
of class divisions and relations in contemporary societies in which class systems are

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complex and dynamic. Both theories see classes as distinct groups, each class consisting
of individuals with shared economic and social interests which are different from, and
may be in conflict with, those of other classes. Members of a household are thought
to share a common class position, and generally the male head of household’s class
position is seen to determine that of all the members of his household.

Marxist perspectives on class

In Marxist theory social class is determined by an individual or group’s relationship to

the means of production – that is, whether one owns and controls capital or sells one’s
labour power. Those who share a common relationship to the means of production
– owners, labourers – share the same class position. Marx argued that members of the
same class would come to realise that they shared common interests and that these
were in opposition to those of other social classes. The resulting class conflict would
lead to the overthrow of the existing mode of production and its replacement by a new
one. Marx argued that eventually there would be a classless, post-capitalist society in
which social groups no longer sought to exploit each other.
According to Marx there are two main classes in capitalist society, the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat. The former are the owners of the means of production and exploit
the labour of the latter, who have to sell their labour on the market and at market-
determined rates in order to subsist. Exploitation comes about because capitalists
pay workers less than the true value of their labour and thus make a profit – what Marx
called ‘surplus value’. The price of goods on the market (the exchange value) is made
up of two elements: the costs of the raw materials, and the cost of labour. However,
the worker is paid only for some of his or her labour – the amount s/he can demand
as a wage; the remainder is retained as profit. Thus a worker produces surplus value
that constitutes profit. However, only use value is produced when the producer
consumes the product him or herself (as, for example, when a housewife provides a
meal for a family, makes clothes for a child or grows vegetables for the table).
It is evident that for Marx, classes were predominantly made up of men, and that
women were relatively marginal in his analysis. Further, Marx saw class exploitation
as the key issue and other forms of exploitation such as gender and race as secondary
or derivative.

Weberian perspectives on class

Neo-Weberian theories of social class are based on the view that class position is
determined primarily by the labour market, which positions people in a multi-
dimensional status hierarchy. Occupations that share a similar market position – that
is, those in which employees have comparable conditions of employment – are said
to be in the same social class. Weber argued that members of a social class would both
seek to protect their advantages vis-à-vis other groups and try to enhance their share
of rewards and resources. A class would exclude subordinate groups from securing
its advantages by ‘closure’ of opportunities to others, which it defines as inferior and

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ineligible. Subordinate groups try to break through this closure and to access the
advantages of higher groups.
Taking account of the extent to which class dynamics are fluid and complex, those
following a neo-Weberian approach tend to focus on what they describe as ‘socio-
economic status’ which, they argue, is shaped by a combination of class, status and
power and so takes account not just of economic position but also occupation, wealth
and income, status and lifestyle, consciousness and identity as well as a person’s degree
of political influence. Parkin (1979) and Murphy (1984) have argued that Weber’s view
of social stratification, and especially the concepts of socio-economic status, market
position and social closure, can be used to develop an adequate explanation of gender
inequalities. Examples of feminist approaches that have adopted a neo-Weberian
perspective include Walby’s (1990) analysis of the relationship between private and
public patriarchy, and Witz’s (1992) account of the relationship between professions
and patriarchy. Men, it is argued in these approaches, have used strategies of social
closure to exclude women from those occupations with the highest rewards and
status.
Feminists such as Walby and Witz have challenged the conventional view that
stratification theory should only be about explaining class (economic) inequalities, and
have suggested that it should be equally (or more) concerned with inequalities based
on sexual difference, and a range of other fundamental aspects of identity, a criticism
that mainstream sociologists have gradually begun to take on board. Most sociology
textbooks, journals and conferences now accept, then, that a range of factors and not
simply social class differences shape social stratification, although analysis of class
inequalities clearly remains central to sociology, particularly in the UK.

The class system in Britain

Broadly speaking, sociologists in the UK (and other similar societies) tend to identify
three social classes – upper, middle and working. The upper class forms a very small
proportion of the population in Britain – about 10 per cent – and has received relatively
little sociological attention. It comprises the landed aristocracy and those who live
on income derived from the ownership of land, business, property, etc. – what Marxists
refer to as the bourgeoisie. Top civil servants, the heads of the armed forces and
members of the government may also be classified as upper class. The middle class
comprises professional and managerial workers – for example, teachers, doctors,
university lecturers, the clergy, factory managers, clerks, civil servants, and so on. The
working class is made up of service personnel and manual workers – e.g. waitresses,
cooks, car mechanics, bricklayers, dustmen, and so on.
The division between manual and non-manual workers was seen as an important
class divide by Weber, who saw the skills that individuals brought to the market as
a key determinant of the rewards they receive for their work. Those with scarce skills
could command higher pay and superior conditions of work. However, with universal
schooling and the routinisation of clerical and service work the significance of the
manual/non-manual divide has been eroded as the pay and work conditions of (male)
routine non-manual workers have declined relative to those of skilled manual workers.

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While there are a variety of social class scales used by sociologists and others in
the UK and elsewhere, probably the most significant official measure in Britain, one
that provides a relatively straightforward way of classifying social groups by occu-
pation, is the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC). Announced
in 1998 and introduced for the 2001 UK Census, this scheme replaced the Registrar
General’s scale. The Registrar General’s scale (used in the UK since the 1911 Census)
provided a relatively straightforward classification of occupational categories, and
was widely used throughout the twentieth century (this scale should not be confused
with the social grading – ABC1-scale used by market researchers which uses letters
to label ‘classes’). It ranked occupations of similar social standing from professionals
to unskilled manual workers. The six categories in this scale are shown in Table 3.2.
The revised NS-SEC scheme ranks labour market position not simply according to
occupation but also job security, promotion prospects and work autonomy. It divides
the population into eight social classes, as shown in Table 3.3.

Table 3.2 Registrar General’s scale

Class Name of class Examples

1 Professional Solicitors, accountants

2 Managerial and technical Managers, teachers, nurses
3a Skilled non-manual Secretaries, sales assistants
3b Skilled manual Bricklayers, electricians
4 Semi-skilled Bus drivers, fitters
5 Unskilled manual Pub/bar staff, cleaners

Table 3.3 National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC)

Class Name Examples

1 Higher professional or High court judge

managerial
1.1 Large employers and senior Senior police officer
managers
1.2 Higher professional Solicitor, social worker
2 Lower managerial and Nurse, journalist
professional
3 Intermediate Secretary, administrator
4 Small employers and Publican, farmer, taxi driver
self-employed
5 Lower supervisory, craft and Printer, plumber, butcher
technical
6 Semi-routine Shop assistant, hairdresser
7 Routine occupations Courier, labourer, waiter
8 Long-term unemployed (or never worked)

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Although the Registrar General’s scale was widely used it was replaced for several
reasons, including:

1 socio-economic changes concentrating an increasing proportion of the population in

classes 3a and 3b;
2 increasing variation in earnings and social status within categories; and
3 the classification of women according to the occupation of their nearest male relative
(male ‘head of household’).

This latter point in particular had been the subject of ongoing criticism from feminist
social scientists concerned to understand the relationship between women and social
class which, they argued, was obscured by the routine classification of women
according to the social class of their (male) ‘head of household’.

Women and social class

Prior to 2001, feminists in the UK had continually challenged the long-standing practice
by which many women were thought to have a derived class position, determined by
the occupational experiences of the man with whom they lived. Ann and Robin Oakley
(1979) pointed out that the instructions generally given to survey interviewers
were that if a man is living in the household it will be his occupation that determines
the household’s class. This was not just a coding device; it amounted to a theoretical
statement that women’s experiences, loyalties and social actions are determined by
the occupational position of the man with whom they live, and not by their own experi-
ences. Acker (1973) suggests that there were five shortcomings to this conventional
approach:

1 the assumption that the family is the rational unit of analysis, with complete class
equivalence within it;
2 that the social position of the family is determined by the occupation of the head
of the household;
3 that the male is necessarily the head of the household;
4 that women not living with a man nonetheless determine their own class;
5 the assumption that inequalities between men and women are inherent and
inevitable.

Feminists argued not just that the classification of women by the class of male heads
of household was sexist, but that the basic assumptions on which this position rested
were false. Sheila Allen (1982) for instance pointed out that a wife does not acquire
her husband’s education on marriage, nor does she automatically acquire a socially
or politically powerful background or network (which even if she does can often be lost
on divorce or widowhood).
Feminists have argued that the incorporation of women into research on social
class necessitates at the very least a modification of existing theories and conclusions,
if not a complete rethinking of them (see Crompton and Mann, 1986; Abbott and

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Sapsford, 1987). Elizabeth Garnsey (1978) argues that taking the household as the
unit of analysis obscures inequalities between women and men within it and also
the different market and work situations they face outside of it. Women tend to be at the
bottom within each occupational class (see Chapter 9), and this pervasive inequality
needs to be seen as central to the study of social stratification. The participation
of women in the labour market affects the nature of that market for men. Women are
disproportionately concentrated in low-paid, low-status jobs, and this affects the range
of jobs available for men. The sex-typing of jobs as ‘female’ has resulted, historically,
in them losing status and economic reward – as in the case of clerical work – or being
created as lowly paid, low-status jobs – as, for example, speech therapy in Britain
(Crompton and Sanderson, 1990). It is just not the case, as David Lockwood has
argued, that ‘it is the position of an occupation within some hierarchy of authority
that is decisive for its status and not the sex of the person who happens to be in it’ (1986,
p. 21). The ways in which female wage labour and domestic labour are combined
and interact with each other and with the capitalist system also have complex
consequences for class structure and class consciousness.
There is considerable evidence to suggest that women’s social class position
cannot be ignored or treated as derivative from the social class position of husbands,
partners or fathers; not only does this fail to explain their social and political behaviour,
it often leads to mistaken conclusions about the social mobility of men and the structure
of class-based stratification for both genders. For example, the social mobility of
men and the openness of the occupational structure to upward mobility cannot be
fully understood without taking the mobility and occupational distribution of women
into account. Women’s preparedness to ‘have a job’ rather than following a career
is certainly important in explaining male mobility; few ‘dual income’ families actually
have two partners following careers – more often the male has a career and the woman
fits her work into the demands of that career. Janet Finch (1983) has demonstrated
the importance of a wife’s unpaid labour for many men in enabling them to follow their
occupations, and Tony Chapman (2003) has suggested that most upward mobility
depends on the wife being able to take on the ‘higher’ lifestyle.
The study of women’s social class convinces us at least of the importance of
studying family members in their own right and not making common-sense assump-
tions about shared household norms and interests or shared experience of the social
world. It may be, contingently, that there are considerable shared interests and
a considerable amount of shared experience. It may be that social class is a more
important principle of stratification than gender in our society. That this is the case must
be demonstrated, however, not taken for granted in the untheorised way which has
been typical of much malestream sociological (and governmental) research on social
class, yet it is only relatively recently that sociologists and demographers have begun
to accept this.

Race, ethnicity and stratification

Class and gender stratification interact then in complex ways that much sociological
research has ignored or overlooked. This same point can be made about the interaction

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between sexual difference and racialised forms of stratification; that is, that they have
been largely overlooked sociologically. Racialised men and women are those subject
to racial differentiation and racism. Feminists such as Kum-Kum Bhavnani define
racism as

a system of domination and subordination based on spurious biological notions

that human beings can be fitted into racially distinct groups. It is identified as a
‘natural’ process and is seen to be a logical consequence of the differentiation of
human beings into ‘races’. Given that there is no sound evidence from the natural
and biological sciences to justify the assumption that the human species can
be divided up into separate ‘races’, both ‘race’ and racism come to be economic,
political, ideological and social expressions. In other words, ‘race’ is not a social
category which is empirically defined; rather, it is created, reproduced and
challenged through economic, political and ideological institutions.
(Bhavnani, 1993, p. 27)

Bhavnani goes on to outline four ways in which processes that have resulted in the
marginalisation of women apply also to racialised groups. These are:

1 erasure – the process by which experiences are removed or ‘hidden’ from history;
2 denial – the process by which differences between men and women, white and
black, heterosexual and homosexual, young and old, working class and middle class
are not acknowledged;
3 invisibility – the outcome when differences are not considered as something worthy
of research, for example, survey findings are not analysed in terms of the racial
identity, or gender, or sexual orientation, or age of the respondent (these are not
considered important or relevant variables, and thus differences are rendered
invisible);
4 tokenism – when racial groups (or gender, or class) are analysed separately, but the
need to modify or reformulate the analysis to take full account of difference is not
recognised.

It would be problematic if feminists, while criticising the marginalisation of women,

did not acknowledge also the social processes that have marginalised racialised
groups (see Chapter 2). Many sociologists have argued that the position of racialised
men and women, in the UK and elsewhere, needs to be understood with reference
to patterns of colonialism and migration, as this enables us to begin to locate racial
inequalities within their social, economic and political context (see Braham et al., 1992;
Solomos, 2003).
For instance, in the period after the Second World War the UK government
encouraged workers from post-colonial societies to migrate to Britain to fill job vacan-
cies, initially in the service of post-war economic recovery and subsequently during
a period of economic expansion. The initial immigration in the early 1950s was mainly
from the Caribbean, and Asian immigrants (largely from India and Pakistan) came in
the late 1950s and early 1960s. Immigrants were expected to come and fill the growing
number of job vacancies and to take on the low-paid, low-skilled jobs that indigenous

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workers were reluctant to accept. These immigrant workers were often met with
hostility by the latter, who (urged on by racist ideologies and stereotypes – in the mass
media, for instance) regarded them as inferior and as a threat to a British ‘way of life’.
They were often seen as being in competition for housing, educational and health
services and blamed for the deteriorating state of the inner cities, particularly from the
1970s on. Both the mass media and politicians clearly played a major role in shaping
racist ideas in this respect. While many migrant workers had thought that coming
to Britain would be like coming home, returning to the ‘mother’ country, many expe-
rienced considerable hostility, a low standard of living, poor educational facilities for
their children and eventual unemployment (particularly since the 1970s) fuelled largely
by a hostile political and media culture.

Sociological perspectives on racial inequality

The status of racialised groups has often been ‘explained’ by reference to biological
factors – for example, that Black or Asian people are inherently less intelligent than
white people, a proposition to which the work of psychologists such as Eysenck (1971)
and Jensen (1973) has given some scientific credibility. An alternative explanation
is one that focuses on norms and values – the idea that immigrant groups do not share
the values of white society and that this explains why they do not ‘get on’. Recent
debates on the disproportionate representation of Black families amongst the so-called
‘underclass’ in Europe and the USA have often conflated both of these (biological and
cultural) explanations in this respect, intimating for instance that because single
parenthood is supposedly more socially acceptable in some ethnic groups than others,
Black families are more likely to fall into cycles of deprivation. Similarly, racial prejudice
has been ‘explained’ in terms of the blind and irrational prejudice against ‘outsiders’
of bigoted individuals or the inability of groups to cope with the ‘unusual’ cultural
character of a different racial group – that is, the group’s way of life, including language,
religion, family customs, clothes, and so on. All these ‘common-sense’ explanations
tend to present non-white people as ‘deviant’ or as ‘strangers’ and seek to explain
reactions to this status. This leads to a tendency to study the characteristics of ethnic
minority groups themselves and to make a problem out of these very characteristics
rather than problematising racist structures and ideologies.
Such approaches to understanding racial disadvantage, sociologists argue, are
dependent upon the perpetuation of racial stereotypes (often relating to sexuality,
criminality and so on) and are not really explanations for racial inequalities, in a
sociological sense. Rather, biological or cultural ‘explanations’ are merely self-
confirming prejudices – dominant ideologies that position particular groups of people
as inferior thus ‘confirming’ their inferiority. In this sense, such approaches tend
to individualise or essentialise what sociologists would argue are social, structural
inequalities.
More sociological approaches to understanding racial stratification attempt to
analyse the institutional structures within society as a whole – and this includes white,
Western sociology – which has often presented ‘the problem’ in terms of difference
rather than in terms of racism (e.g. CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies),

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1982; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1993). Two major theories of race and ethnicity have
emerged in sociology – neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian.

Neo-Marxist perspectives on racial inequalities

Marxists argue that racial disadvantage can be explained by reference to the class
structure of capitalism. Racialised groups are an integral part of the proletariat, the
working class, who are exploited by capitalists. Racial prejudice can be explained
by reference to Britain’s colonial past and the development of ideologies during
the nineteenth century that justified British and European exploitation of the Black
and Asian inhabitants of colonial societies by suggesting that they were inferior.
Patterns of migration into the UK in the 1950s and 1960s must be seen in the context
of the needs of industrial capitalism. Migrant workers came to a country where
ideologies of racial inferiority/superiority already existed. As the economic situation
changed and a shortage of jobs arose, prejudice intensified the already relatively
disadvantaged position of Black and Asian men and women. Furthermore, Marxists
argue that the ruling class is able to exploit the ideologies of racial prejudice to maintain
its position of dominance. Thus conflict between Black, Asian and white working-
class people is based on white people blaming Black and Asian people for their bad
housing, lack of hospital resources, etc., while the Black and Asian population
blame their plight on the prejudice of white people with whom they come into contact.
This, it is argued, deflects attention away from the ‘real’ – structural – causes of racial
inequalities, the economic exploitation of the working class as a whole. Racism
therefore helps to sustain what Marxists term ‘false consciousness’, in this respect
preventing various factions of the working class from recognising their own, shared
exploitation.
Marxist approaches to understanding racial disadvantage have been criticised
for being overly simplistic, however – for failing to acknowledge or explain why it is
that not all ethnic groups share the same structural position (in the UK for instance,
Black men and women are relatively disadvantaged compared to most Asian groups
in terms of key social indicators such as employment, housing and health). This
has led many sociologists to argue that Black people experience an additional layer
of disadvantage that somehow differentiates them from the rest of the working class.
Those who adopt this approach tend to be associated with more of a Weberian than
a Marxist analysis of racial inequalities.

Neo-Weberian perspectives on racial inequalities

Neo-Weberian sociologists tend to reject a Marxist theory of racial divisions. They

argue that racial disadvantage arises out of competition between groups for scarce
resources – such as housing, employment and education. Hence, Weberian sociologists
emphasise that structural disadvantage is compounded by racism. Because a person’s
status and life chances are determined by their ‘market capacity’ – a person’s ability
to sell his or her labour power – racism (combined with practices of ‘closure’) devalues

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the market capacity of certain ethnic groups (Carter, 2003). In Britain and elsewhere
the white indigenous population has used social closure against racialised groups,
especially those from former colonial societies and their descendants, to perpetuate
their structurally disadvantaged position.

Feminist perspectives on racial inequalities

Black feminists have criticised both Marxist and Weberian theories of racial and ethnic
disadvantage for failing to take adequate account of gender differences, and for not
realising that the experiences of racialised women, and the ways in which they are
exploited, are different from the case of racialised men. In the UK, for instance, many
Black women often experience subordination and exploitation as women, as members
of the working class and on the basis of their race or ethnicity. Sociologists have been
concerned to reject biological and psychological explanations for the subordinate and
inferior position of Black and Asian women in Britain and elsewhere. Instead they
have explored the social and structural aspects of social inequalities and examined
how Black and Asian women become socially constructed as subordinate. They have
considered differences in power, both in social and in economic terms, and examined
the ways in which patriarchal and racist ideologies have come to construct some
women as inferior, and to justify their unequal social status, often by framing Black
and Asian women as ‘dependents’. Women immigrants have not come to Britain just
as the dependents of men, however. In the 1980s, they made up about a quarter of the
immigrant labour force in Britain and over 40 per cent of all migrants (Phizacklea,
1983). Yet as Sheila Allen and Carole Walkowitz (1987) have argued, racialised and
ethnic minority women tend to be concentrated in arduous and poorly paid work
and experience relatively high rates of unemployment as well as being engaged in
unregistered home-based work.
Black and Asian women are disadvantaged in housing, in employment, in the
health service and in the criminal justice process. Black families are more likely to
be seen as inadequate or incapable of caring for their children, and Black women are
over-represented in the prison population. In employment, Black and Asian women
may be concentrated in the same occupational categories as white women, but this
may conceal the fact that they are more likely to be in lower-status and lower-paid work
within those categories (Abbott and Tyler, 1995).
Sociologists have argued that this situation is not just a result of individual
prejudices, but of ‘institutional racism’. This was defined in the Macpherson Report
(1999), published at the end of the inquiry into the Metropolitan Police’s investigation
into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, as

the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional

service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen
or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination
through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping
which disadvantage minority ethnic people.
(Macpherson Report, 1999, p. 1)

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Examples of institutional racism would be the ways in which successive Immigration

Acts have excluded Black immigrants while still permitting white immigration.
(Although Britain now restricts immigration of white non-EU nationals, for a
considerable period of time it did not.)
Black and post-colonial feminists have argued that both malestream and white
feminist models of oppression are inadequate for understanding the experiences of
racialised women. By setting up theories of women’s oppression as applying to all
women they have contributed to ‘institutionalised racism’ (see Chapter 2). Black
feminists have pointed out how women from post-colonial societies, and particularly
Southeast Asian ones, are often perceived as dominated and oppressed by their
own cultures. Assimilation into Western mores is therefore portrayed (ethnocentrically)
as a form of liberation, allowing women to rebel against their families, wear Western
clothes, cut their hair, and so on. Similarly, Western feminists have argued that for
white women the nuclear family is a central site of oppression, partly because of the
way in which familial ideology situates women in the private sphere (Walby, 1990).
Some Black feminists, on the other hand, have argued that the family – threatened
by slavery, indentured labour and migration – is often something to be defended, a
source of support and resistance to racism (Brah, 1986).
Some feminists have questioned whether the whole notion of ‘patriarchy’ – and
analyses such as Walby’s (1990) that describe a shift from private to public patriarchy
– is applicable to the experiences of Black women (and men). Black men never
possessed ‘patriarchal power’ over women in the way that white men did. However,
many Black feminists have argued not for the rejection of the concept of patriarchy
but for an analysis that recognises the specific situation of racialised men and
women in patriarchal societies. For example, Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis
(1993) point out how women are exploited as unpaid workers in family businesses
in some ethnic minority groups. Often (male) entrepreneurs have set up businesses as
a way of avoiding exclusion and disadvantage, but they then exploit the upaid labour
of their own family members or the lowly paid labour of other women from ethnic
minority groups.
What is evident is that it is very difficult to make sociological generalisations about
all racialised groups, which have very different histories and traditions. While many
Black and Asian women came to Britain and other European societies explicitly as
workers, some came to join families but later became workers.
In sum, sociological studies of racialised groups have tended to ignore the diverse
experiences of men and women, and the sociology of gender has proceeded relatively
separately from the sociology of race and ethnicity. White feminist accounts of
women’s oppression have tended to be relatively ignorant of the distinctive experi-
ences of racialised men and women. The sources of oppression of white women – for
example, the nuclear family – are not necessarily the same for Black and Asian women.
Racialised women (and men) are oppressed not only by sexual difference, but by
the intersections of class, race and ethnicity.

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Disability and stratification

Many sociologists concerned with disability and impairment have argued that disabled
people are also relatively overlooked sociologically and that, despite the recent resur-
gence of sociological interest in the body, disabled people have often had only a token
presence in sociological analysis. One seemingly plausible explanation for this is
that disabled people are only a small minority of the population of most societies and
have, therefore, like many other minorities before them, simply escaped sociological
notice. However, there are two basic problems with this seemingly ‘common-sense’
assumption. First, research suggests that disabled people are not a statistical minority
– in the UK approximately 6.8 million adults are disabled (www.nso.gov). These figures,
of course, cannot be accepted uncritically (any more than any other official statistics
can) and, if anything, they are likely to be an underestimate, but they do give an
indication of the extent to which disabled people have been ignored. Second,
sociologists have never simply played a ‘numbers game’, taking an interest only
in large groups. Being a minority activity or group has never stopped sociologists
from taking a research interest in say crime or suicide, for instance, any more than
large numbers prevented women from being relatively ignored sociologically until
recently.
Other reasons for the sociological neglect of disability might include the under-
representation of disabled people in academia (and in the labour market generally)
– so it might be that few sociologists are themselves disabled. Related to this, disability
provokes a range of emotional responses in the non-disabled and avoidance – that
is, not studying disability – is perhaps one way in which sociologists have dealt
with this. However, perhaps the most likely explanation for the sociological neglect of
disability is the way in which it has traditionally been perceived as an individual, often
medical, ‘problem’ rather than a social issue.
A sociology of disability is beginning to establish itself, however, based largely
on a social model that has its roots in political campaigns against medicalisation,
discrimination, inequality and welfare dependency (Oliver, 1983). This social model
rejects both a bio-medical approach to disability that frames impairment in terms
of a deficient or defective body in need of ‘cure’ and an individualised, welfare model
that defines disability largely in terms of personal tragedy, and a person in need of
‘care’.

The social model of disability

Underpinning the social model of disability is a focus on the ways in which disabled
people confront both the aesthetic norms and structural configurations of ‘able bodied
society’ and are disadvantaged as a result. Whereas a medical model of disability
assumes that the degree of impairment determines the degree of disability, a social
model focuses on the ways in which social factors (including physical, organisational
and attitudinal arrangements) determine the degree to which a particular impairment
is disabling. The development of this latter approach has led to a sociological concern
with the ways in which bodies – and hence, disabilities – are socially constructed

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(Barnes et al., 1999). This sociological approach has also highlighted the extent to
which disabled people are disproportionately affected by poverty and social exclusion
because not only are they relatively disadvantaged in the labour market, disabled
people may also have to meet the ‘extra costs’ of impairment (Barnes et al., 1999).
Research evidence suggests that disability has a considerable impact on an
individual’s labour market position. In the UK, for instance, there were 6.8 million
people of working age with a disability, of whom just under 50 per cent were econom-
ically active. This compares, according to Social Trends 2001, to an economic activity
rate for the whole working age population of 78 per cent (www.nso.gov). Disabled
men are more likely than disabled women to be in employment, as Table 3.4 indicates.

Table 3.4 Economic activity status of disabled people by sex, UK, 2001 (%)

Males Females All

All in employment 49.1 44.6 46.9

Full time 43.5 22.9 33.8
Part time 5.6 21.6 13.1

Unemployed 5.1 3.2 4.2

Less than one year 3.1 2.3 2.7
One year or more 2.0 0.9 1.5

Economically inactive 45.8 52.2 48.8

All disabled people (=100%) (millions) 3.6 3.2 6.8

Source: www.nso.gov

Recent decades have been witness to a politicisation of disability, which has been
transformed from a medical or individual problem into a civil rights issue, so that in
many societies disabled people have collectively organised themselves into a social
movement. Much like women, Black and gay people, disabled people have self-
consciously organised themselves into a movement demanding emancipation from
social oppression and exclusion. As Kevin Paterson and Bill Hughes have put it,

Disabled people are (and have been throughout modernity) depicted as dependent
individuals waiting patiently or petulantly for care, cure or charity. The elimination
of this infantilizing portrayal of disability is a central tenet of the disabled people’s
movement. Rather than accept the injunction to ‘pass as normal’, the movement
has adopted the Gay Rights concept of ‘pride’ in difference and the practice of
‘coming out’. . . . ‘Coming out’ transforms the ideology of the disabled body as
deficit into a statement of collective muscularity. Indeed, the concepts of political
‘movement’ and ‘activist’ challenge the notion of the ‘dependent invalid’. They
symbolize agency and autonomy.
(Paterson and Hughes, 2000, p. 31)

The social model on which the disability movement is grounded is based largely
on a sociological distinction between (physical) impairment and (social) disablement,

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one that in many ways parallels other distinctions in sociology – between race and
ethnicity, sex and gender, for instance. Since much of the discrimination and exclusion
of disabled people has been justified, ideologically, on grounds of physical difference
the disability movement has tended to ignore or underplay the ‘impaired’ body and
to focus instead on the structural aspects of a disabling society. Michael Oliver (1983,
1990) in particular has claimed that disability is socially produced in an analysis that
distinguishes between (pre-social) physical impairment and socially constituted dis-
ability. This dualistic view of disability and impairment (much like sex and gender,
race and ethnicity) facilitated a de-biologisation and a politicisation of disability that
parallels the feminist attack on ‘biology as destiny’ in the sex–gender distinction (see
Chapter 1).
A major strength of this approach is that it could be used to challenge dominant
medical or charitable models of disability and the portrayal of disabled people as victims
of their bodies. However, just as various binary oppositions have been subject to criti-
cism in recent years, particularly by those who have argued that seemingly pre-social,
biological categories such as ‘sex’ and ‘race’ are actually socially constructed (see Butler,
1990 and also Guillaumin, 1995), so too has the distinction between impairment and
disability. Paterson and Hughes (2000, p. 40) in particular have problematised the
way in which ‘the social model of disability denies the embodied experiences of
pain and affliction that are an integral part of the lives of many people with impairments’.
In doing so, their account also highlights that debates about how the experience of
disability varies with respect to class, gender, race and sexuality need to be opened
up within sociology, and some of the areas of overlap between disability studies and
feminist sociology need to be more clearly articulated.

Disability, identity and difference

Several writers, such as Morris (1991), Begum (1992) and Abu-Habib (1997) have
emphasised the need for a greater exploration of issues relating to the gendered and
racial aspects of disability. Barbara Fawcett (2000) has observed that, although there
are some notable exceptions, issues of gender, race and sexuality are only just starting
to feature strongly in writing on disability. She highlights the difficulties associated with
viewing disabled people and women as homogenous, unified groups rather than as
diverse associations. Some writers such as Morris (1996) and Crow (1996) argue that
we should explore differences in the lived experience of disability as these are shaped
by gender, age, race, sexuality and impairment. Others such as Finkelstein (1993) and
Oliver (1990) are wary of the consequences of fragmenting the disability movement
in this way, because of the implications this might have for its political unity and also
for the coherence of the social model as a credible alternative to bio-medical and
welfare-based approaches. In this sense, Fawcett (2000) notes the ways in which the
debate over ‘projected homogeneity’ in disability studies parallels that taking place
within contemporary feminism that has, as we noted in Chapter 2, been struggling
with questions of difference and sameness for some time.
Indeed, it is largely within this political and theoretical context that feminist
perspectives on disability have begun to draw attention to the social construction of
disabled bodies as gendered. As Fawcett puts it,

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Within the UK, the social model of disability and disability rights campaigns based
on the social model of disability have only relatively recently begun to grapple with
issues of diversity and difference between and amongst various groupings in
relation to gender and also impairment, ‘race’, class, age, sexuality and varying
dimensions of social division.
(Fawcett, 2000, p. 36)

Feminist perspectives on disability

Early formulations of the social model of disability have been subject to critical
amendment by disabled women, who have argued that differences between men and
women who are disabled have been neglected (Lloyd, 2001). Disabled women activists
have, however, been equally critical of the failure of mainstream feminism to recognise
disabled women’s perspectives. Lloyd has proposed the development of ‘a model
of disability which understands the concerns of disabled women as central to both
feminism and disability politics’ (p. 715), highlighting the importance of developing a
disabled perspective on some of the complex issues on the feminist agenda such as
sexuality and reproduction, for instance. Feminist perspectives in particular have
emphasised the ways in which gender shapes the lived experience of disability both
for men and women who are disabled, but also for those who are carers of, or assistants
to, disabled people, by far the majority of whom are women. Sociologists have argued
that not only is the majority of this caring work unpaid; it is also largely unrecognised.
Morris (1991, 1996), however, draws attention to the way in which homogeneity is
also assumed in this respect, often by malestream sociologists and members of the
disability movement, and highlights differences between disabled people and in
the nature of caring relationships. She further criticises feminists such as Gillian Dalley
(1988) who unproblematically refer to able-bodied women as ‘carers’ and (ungendered)
disabled people as those who are cared for. Morris insists that disabled men and
women ‘care’ too and emphasises the ways in which caring relationships are often
reciprocal and inter-dependent, and are shaped by a range of factors including (but not
limited to) disability.
Feminist writers on disability have argued for the social model to be recon-
ceptualised to take into account not just material inequalities and the way in which
we think about relationships of inter-dependency, but also issues relating to cultural
representations and practices such as language and media culture. Abberley (1997),
for instance, emphasises the importance for disability studies of feminist deconstruction
which, although rejected by many feminists, she argues has considerable political
potential for developing a critique of value-laden concepts such as ‘birth defect’ or
‘invalidity’, as well as more fundamental binary distinctions between impairment and
disability (see Paterson and Hughes, 2000, and the previous section).
Feminists have also drawn attention to the way in which disabled people are
effectively denied sexual agency and have argued that this is especially the case with
regard to (both disabled and non-disabled) women who tend to be socially constructed,
in gendered terms, as sexually passive. Notable exceptions to this are works such as
Passion in Plenitude, which was commissioned (in 1991) by the Council for the Disabled

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in the Netherlands, and is developed by Gon Buurman (1997) in her account of the
embodied experiences of disabled women that displays their struggles, but also their
powers and pleasures, photographically.
Another aspect of disability that feminists have argued is fundamentally gendered
is pregnancy and childbirth, and feminists have highlighted issues relating to repro-
ductive technologies and genetic screening that sociology (including feminist
sociology) has yet to address with reference to the relationship between gender and
disability in any sustained way (Lloyd, 2001). Julie Kent (2000), for instance, makes only
passing reference to disability in her discussion of social perspectives on pregnancy
and childbirth.
Although feminism has begun to make a significant contribution to disability
studies, there still remains much work to be done – empirically, theoretically and, of
course, politically. In this respect, Barbara Fawcett (2000) outlines four main ways
in which feminist insights could be incorporated into disability studies. These are:

1 deconstructive analysis (that problematises disability in terms of its discourse);

2 a critique of binary oppositions (between the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’);
3 issues of unity (identifying ways of valuing diversity without losing sight of political
and intellectual coherence); and
4 the place of experience (in maintaining a communal voice campaigning for change).

In sum, much like race and ethnicity, writing about disability in sociology has been
both contentious and relatively neglected. Questions relating to the relationship
between disability and gender have only recently begun to be addressed sociologically.
Sociologists tend to work with a social model of disability that challenges the bio-
medical assumptions of a medical model as well as the framing of disability in terms
of ‘personal tragedy’ and charity. That this model is dependent upon a problematic
distinction between (pre-social) impairment and (social) disability has also been noted,
however. Feminists have drawn attention to the ways in which disabled people and
women alike are seen to comprise undifferentiated, unitary groups and have argued
that this can be both beneficial in political terms but problematic in so far as it fails to
take account of diversity in lived experience and other aspects of identity. Feminists
have also highlighted the ways in which disabled women in particular are denied sexual
agency, as well as drawing attention to some of the ways in which disability is gendered
both for disabled men and women, but also for those who are carers of, or assistants
to, disabled people.

Global stratification

Just as the relatively disadvantaged position of disabled people has been sustained
through their being defined as ‘Other’ – different from the norm – so too has the
marginal position of non-Western people. ‘The Rest’ is a term developed by sociologist
Stuart Hall (1992a) to refer to countries outside of the ‘core’ of Western industrialised
nations; they are also often referred to as the ‘developing nations’, or ‘underdeveloped’,
‘less developed’, or ‘non-industrial nations’, or as ‘the Third World’. They include areas

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such as Latin America, much of Southeast Asia and most of sub-Saharan, West and
East Africa. Hall coined the term ‘The West and the Rest’ then to distinguish between
Western industrialised nations and developing countries. The term ‘the Rest’ in this
sense consciously lumps together a large variety of cultures and countries and so
reflects the way in which they are positioned both economically and politically
within Western (colonial) ideology. In doing so, the distinction between the West
and the Rest provides a useful framework for understanding the relative position
of countries existing in a state of economic dependence upon the West; a state that
has been created by the imperialistic economic policies of capitalist countries and by
multinational corporations in their desire to create global ‘empires’.
In ‘the Rest’ there is a large pool of cheap labour available and prepared to
work for relatively low wages – far less than workers in Britain. This potential labour
pool has been exploited by Western capitalism in two ways: first, Western firms
have moved production to developing countries, and second, Western governments
and corporations have encouraged immigration from developing countries to remedy
labour shortages in their own economies. In developing countries taxation is generally
very low as there is no welfare state, no pension and no social security system for
the majority of people. Employers can get away with production processes which
are much more dangerous to people and the environment than would be allowed in
the West – and therefore cheaper – since the industrial safety and environmental
protection legislation is less stringently enforced than in Western nations. It is
important to recognise that not only are women from developing or post-colonial
societies exploited and racialised by capitalism, but that women in the West often
benefit (albeit indirectly) from the exploitation of women in ‘the Rest’. As Macionis and
Plummer (2002, p. 212) have put it: ‘in rich societies, the work women do is typically
unrecognized, undervalued and underpaid; women receive less income for their efforts
than men do. In low-income countries, this pattern is even more pronounced.’
While the situation of ‘the Rest’ generally receives little attention in the West, the
position of women particularly receives even less. However, gender serves to structure
social relationships in all societies, and just as Western economic and cultural relations
have penetrated Third World countries, destroying traditional ways of life and creating
dependent economies, so Western notions of femininity and the family have likewise
been imposed upon other models of gender and rendered them ‘peculiar’, ‘heathen’,
‘unliberated’ or sexually exotic. On the other hand, the adoption of Western lifestyles
and gender roles is often seen as evidence of ‘progress’. This has created considerable
conflict and contradictions for many women living in developing countries, or in
cultures that have been subject to rapid social change brought about by recent devel-
opments in media and communication technologies (such as advertising, the internet
and satellite television, for instance – see Chapter 12), particularly in societies where
there are clear tensions between traditional norms and values and more commercial,
Western influences.
Sociology has tended to concentrate on explaining why the poorer countries of
the world have not industrialised in the same way as the richer nations. Some theories
have tended to stress the lack of motivation or the inappropriate attitudes of ‘the Rest’,
or suggest that they lack the economic foundation on which to build, or that they
have been systematically exploited and underdeveloped by Western countries. Less

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attention has been paid to the role of women in ‘the Rest’ and what happens to them
as countries attempt to industrialise and develop. Many women working in agriculture
or industrial production in their own countries are exploited both by the men of their
own country and by Western capitalists, as women (and their children) are seen as a
source of cheap and docile labour, to be used to provide goods for Western markets.
Seager and Olsen (1986) suggest that we need to understand the ordinary lives
of women and to recognise their common everyday experiences:

They are the providers of food, fuel, water and often the whole family income
– the sustainers and developers of their families, communities and countries . . .
the fate of women is a critical determinant of the fate of whole societies.
(Margaret Snyder, UN Voluntary Fund for Women,
quoted in Seager and Olsen, 1986, p. 7)

Third World women are, in many ways, worse off than their male counterparts – they
have less power, less authority, do more work for less money and have more respon-
sibility than men. They are also more vulnerable to extreme forms of exploitation such
as sex tourism (see Chapter 8). In most societies women shoulder the primary
responsibility for housework, nursing children and meeting the needs of their families,
and in many countries women are also responsible for farming. According to the
United Nations women constitute half the world’s population but do nearly two-
thirds of the world’s work, receive 10 per cent of the world’s income and own less
than 1 per cent of the property. Women are therefore disproportionately the poorest
of the world’s poor – the UN estimates that more than 500 million of the 800 million
people living in absolute poverty and whose lives are at risk as a result are women
(www.un.org).
Women who are displaced or are refugees are particularly at risk from extreme
poverty and famine. Refugees are people who flee their own country for political or
economic reasons, or to avoid war and oppression. They usually experience not
only extreme material hardship but also a well-founded fear of persecution. In leav-
ing behind their ‘home’ they have not only to abandon their possessions but also
leave behind their families and social networks. Kushner and Knox (1999) have
described the twentieth century as ‘the century of the refugee’ noting how at the end
of the century the majority of the world’s people were not where they were at the
beginning.
Central and Eastern Europe is a particularly interesting example in this respect,
with a population of more than 550 million. In 1989, there were only nine independent
countries across the region – today that figure has increased to twenty-seven. The
establishment of so many nations in such a relatively short time has been a factor
contributing to a tremendous increase in migration since the 1990s. Migration patterns
vary considerably within Central and Eastern Europe, and indeed elsewhere, and
men and women tend not to experience the same patterns – women have traditionally
travelled shorter distances than men (often within the same province), men have
generally tended to migrate longer distances, often across national or regional
boundaries in search of work. Although research evidence suggests that women are
increasingly migrating internationally as autonomous economic actors, many migrant

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women continue to have limited access to economic and social welfare programmes
because of their status as dependents. Migrant women commonly face double discrimi-
nation in the labour market (being both female and foreign), and generally earn less
as migrant workers than native born women and men, and migrant men.
In contrast to refugees, displaced people are those who find themselves homeless
in their own land. This may be due to civil war, or to environmental disaster. An
estimated 50 million people across the world live off land that is rapidly deteriorating
(Macionis and Plummer, 2002), and as time progresses they will no longer be able to
live and work off the land they inhabit and so become displaced.
Refugees and particularly asylum seekers are always controversial groups and,
with the expansion of the European Union in 2004, debate in Europe has begun to
coalesce around issues such as humanitarian need and national identity. Refugees
effectively ‘test’ the willingness of governments and societies to provide asylum on
humanitarian grounds. They are also vulnerable to human trafficking and commercial
exploitation by gaining illegal entry into countries by effectively selling themselves
as workers – an industry that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the UN
estimates to be one of the largest and most profitable in the world and in which women
are disproportionately exploited (see Chapter 8). Many of the women and girls involved
in trafficking are believed to be subject to sexual harassment and violence, and to be
forced into prostitution; a minority are thought to be engaged as domestic help, usually
with very low (or no) pay and no contractual security (www.un.org).
Development is usually assumed to be ‘a good thing’ despite the enormous human
costs. One area of interest to feminists has been the effects of socio-economic devel-
opment on women. Susan Tiano (1987) has suggested that there are three competing
perspectives on the impact that economic development has had on women:

1 the integration thesis, which argues that development results in female liberation
and sexual equality as women become more centrally involved in economic and
public life;
2 the marginalisation thesis, which holds that with capitalist development women
become increasingly excluded from production roles and confined to the private
sphere of the home – losing in the process their control over resources and
becoming economically dependent on men; and
3 the exploitation thesis, which argues that modernisation results in the creation of
a low-paid female labour force – women become more central to industrial
production (particularly in the provision of services) but are exploited because they
are seen as a secondary labour force.

In order to understand the impact of economic change on women it is necessary

to have some understanding of women’s lives in pre-/non-industrial societies.
However, there is considerable controversy over the position of women in such
societies. There is some agreement among anthropologists that gender inequalities
were less prominent in hunting and gathering societies and in simple horticultural
societies than in peasant-based agrarian ones. However, cultural factors, especially
religion, are also important. Furthermore, the effect that economic change has on
women also depends on class, as well as ethnic status. What is clear is that as a society

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undergoes economic change, so does the nature of work and so does the distinction
between men and women. There is an increase in the sexual division of labour, and
this occurs in a way that seems to perpetuate female subordination. In countries where
men and women both tend to engage in paid work, employment is segregated into
industrial sectors and women are typically in lower-paid work than men, and in work
that is defined as less skilled than the work men do (see Chapter 9).
Industrialisation in developing countries often also means that women become
more closely associated with the domestic sphere, and in many areas they lose the
land they farmed to produce food for their family to men who produce crops for cash.
Thus women’s economic dependency is increased. Often these changes are actively
encouraged by aid agencies and Western employers, who work with Western ideo-
logies of the family and the sexual division of labour (see Chapter 6). Thus, in parts
of Africa where women generally farmed to produce food for their families, aid
agencies have trained primarily men in farming techniques and have encouraged
them to produce cash crops. In the process women have often lost control of their
land or been edged out into more marginal land, which they till with no access to
modern farming technology. The very low pay of women employed in manufacturing
can similarly be said to be based on the assumption that women either have only
themselves to support or are partly supported by a man. Rae Lesser Blumberg (1981)
suggests three reasons why economic development results in the marginalisation
of women:

1 there is an increase in women’s real workload;

2 there is a decrease in women’s resource base; and
3 there is a decrease in women’s well-being and their opportunities as people.

As men are drawn into the cities to participate in the cash economy, women often
have less control over resources. Men are less likely to help out as they are freed, by
the demands of regular paid work, from traditional male domestic responsibilities.
However, women are often expected to continue to grow crops, to feed the family
and carry out all the domestic work. There is also some evidence to suggest that
gender ideologies mean that women’s marginalisation is perpetuated even within
development programmes. Kathleen O’Reilly’s (2004) study of women’s participation
in an Indian drinking water programme found that even those women employed by
the project as fieldworkers were largely marginalised as a consequence of gender
ideology.
The impact of economic change on agriculture varies between regions. In sub-
Saharan Africa and some parts of Southeast Asia and Central America the ‘slash and
burn’ technique has traditionally been used. Men cleared the land while women did
most of the cultivation. Women had a central role in food production and therefore
some influence on decision-making (Blumberg, 1981). European settlers, however,
brought in the idea that farming is men’s work and that crops should be produced for
the market, thus marginalising women. Women were also excluded from agricultural
education; in Africa less than 5 per cent of trained agricultural personnel are women
(www.un.org).
In India the ‘Green Revolution’ – the introduction of modern farming methods –
began in 1964 (Beyres et al., 1983), the goal being for India to become self-sufficient

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in the production of food grains. The changes this brought about had a considerable
impact on women’s roles. In India prior to the Green Revolution women were
economically dependent on men in all classes, although the dependency varied in
form and intensity between classes. As Neerja Chowdhary (1998, cited in Kurian, 2001)
notes in her essay on women in Indian politics, the achievement of post-colonial
independence in India certainly did not lead to a marked improvement in the political
participation or socio-economic position of women across the country. Indeed, in
land-owning and peasant households it was always men who owned the land and
the means of production. In the dominant classes the dependency of women was
further intensified by purdah (the concealment of women), which made it difficult for
them to move outside their own homes, preventing their participation in the public
sphere. Peasant women did work the land owned by their husbands, but only the wives
of poor peasants and landless labourers worked for wages. In all households women
would have been responsible for all domestic duties, including the processing of grain
and looking after livestock.
The introduction of new technology has not affected all parts of India alike, but
where it has been introduced it has tended to result in a decline in employment for
women. In rich peasant households women have been withdrawn from direct
participation in farm work – labour has been hired to do the work previously done by
women. This has reinforced women’s economic dependence on men. In poor peasant
and landless labourer households women have not voluntarily withdrawn from labour
– their wages are essential for survival – but in many cases they have been squeezed
out of employment by the introduction of both new technology and Western gender
ideologies. Hence, male labour is employed to use the new machinery.
A relatively small proportion of women in less developed countries are employed
in factory or office work, but they tend to be employed in ‘female’ jobs. Most production
in Third World countries is mass production for corporations based in developed
countries who have located (or ‘outsourced’) some manufacturing (and increasingly
administrative work) in the Rest but control it from the West. The work exported is
generally standardised and repetitive, calling for little technical knowledge; it is labour-
intensive and often uses assembly-line operations that would be difficult and/or costly
to mechanise still further. The aim is to exploit a suitable labour force – that is, one that
is lower in costs of employment and/or higher in productivity. The wages in non-
western factories and offices are often as little as a tenth of those in the developed
countries, and working hours up to 50 per cent higher, while productivity is as high as
that of the West or higher.
Female labour is cheaper than male labour, female productivity tends to be higher
than that of men, and because of gender ideology women are thought to be ‘naturally’
better than men at some tasks – sewing, for instance. Western owners do not have to
bear the cost of training the female workforce. The work is seen as unskilled, not
because it does not require skill, but because girls are assumed to have already learned
the necessary skills in the home. Much of the relocated or outsourced work is there-
fore defined as women’s work or becomes seen as such because of the perceived
advantages of female labour.
The poverty found in much of the world as a result of global stratification is a
complex problem, reflecting limited industrial technology, rapid population growth,

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traditional cultural patterns, internal social stratification, male domination and global
power relations – particularly those shaped by the demands of capitalist societies and
multinational corporations that have exploited the labour and the economies of
developing and post-colonial countries. Gender inequalities appear to be most pro-
nounced in the world’s poorest countries, and among refugees and asylum seekers.
Whilst economic development may give women opportunities to attend school, to
reduce birth rates and to work outside of the home and hence to weaken traditional
male power bases, this process of ‘modernisation’ also carries risks to women.
Investigating the lives of women in poor, rural areas of Bangladesh, Sultana Alam
(1985) noted three ways in which ‘development’ may impede women’s emancipation.
First, as economic opportunities draw men out of rural areas and into cities, women
and children (often abandoned entirely) must fend for themselves. Second, the
declining strength of the family and the neighbourhood as rural communities are
eroded means that women are often left with little social support. The same applies
to women who have been left alone or with children as a result of divorce or death of
their husband. In the past, Alam argues, other households would have traditionally
taken in a woman who had been left alone. Rather than enhance women’s autonomy,
a developing culture of ‘individualism’ has eroded women’s social support and
worsened their vulnerability to poverty. Third, economic development combined with
the growing influence of Western media and consumer culture has undermined
women’s traditional roles as wives, mothers and daughters and framed women
in increasingly sexual and aesthetic terms – terms defined and imposed by the West.
This culture, Alam notes, has been detrimental to Bangladeshi women in a range of
ways including increasing prostitution and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases,
as well as older women being abandoned by their spouses in favour of younger sexual
partners and left with little means of supporting themselves or their children.
‘Modernisation’ does not, then, impact on men and women in the same way. In
the long term, evidence does suggest that development may bring about a more equal
relationship between men and women, but in the short term, the social and economic
position of women may decline as women are forced to deal with new social problems
that were virtually unknown in more traditional societies.
The subordination and exploitation experienced by women in developing and
post-colonial societies is based not only on ideologies of women’s role but also on
ideologies of racial inferiority developed to justify the West’s exploitation of ‘the Rest’.
Nevertheless, all women’s lives are structured by expectations of role-appropriate
behaviour, the idea that women are – and should be – dependent on men, and the
notion that women’s primary fulfilment comes from marriage and caring for a husband
and children. These assumptions are crucial to understanding women’s subordination
and exploitation – why women lack control over resources. This is equally as true in
the West as in ‘the Rest’.

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Conclusions

We recognise that men’s and women’s experiences are structured by a range of

factors such as class, race, disability, and so on, and that racialised women suffer
discrimination, exploitation and subordination, are ‘othered’, because they are Black
as well as because they are women, for instance. While middle-class women are rela-
tively privileged compared to their working-class sisters, this does not prevent them
from becoming poor if they become a head of a lone-parent family, or from suffering
relative poverty in later life. Subordination and exploitation are also shaped by
global power relations which are based not only on ideologies of women’s role, but
also on ideologies of racial inferiority developed to justify the West’s colonisation and
exploitation of ‘the Rest’. Nevertheless, all women’s lives are structured by social
and cultural expectations of role-appropriate behaviour, the idea that women are – or
should be – dependent on or subordinate to men, and the notion that women’s
fulfilment derives largely from marriage and motherhood. These assumptions are
important to understanding women’s subordination and exploitation – why women
lack control over resources, and to understanding not only the differences between
men and women, but also amongst women.

SUMMARY

1 Men and women experience stratification in different ways, shaped by

sexual difference, social class, race and ethnicity, disability, global
power relations, and so on.
2 Women are disproportionately represented amongst the world’s
poorest groups.
3 Women are generally worse paid and suffer worse conditions of
employment compared with men, the world over.
4 ‘Development’ has often worsened the situation of women because:
(a) Western ideas of sexual difference are imposed through the
introduction of new forms of socio-economic organisation and
through aid programmes;
(b) women are primarily responsible for subsistence and household
needs – maintaining the family economy and bearing and raising
children – whereas men working as migrant labour may have to
leave home altogether;
(c) where women are engaged in production their wages are generally
lower.

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FURTHER READING

Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N. (1993) Racialised Boundaries. London: Routledge. This book is
a critical focus on a relatively neglected aspect of sociology – namely, the relationship between
race, ethnicity and sexual difference. It focuses on issues of identity and difference as these are
shaped by racialised boundaries and patterns of migration.
Cohen, R. and Kennedy, P. (2000) Global Sociology. London: Palgrave. This book takes a
specifically sociological perspective on globalisation which explicitly challenges the ‘West and
the Rest’ stance of many malestream sociology texts. It highlights gender, race and class
inequalities and focuses on how these are shaped by processes of development and globalisation.
It also considers gender politics in relation to themes such as migration, sustainability and new
social movements.
Jackson, S. and Scott, S. (2001) Gender: A Sociological Reader. London: Routledge. This reader
offers an overview of sociological work on gender written over the last thirty years or so. It
includes both empirical and theoretical work from a range of perspectives and each section
addresses intersections between gender, class, race and sexuality.
Savage, M. (2000) Class Analysis and Social Transformation. Buckingham: Open University Press.
This is a comprehensive and engaging summary of sociological debates on social class in the
last twenty years or so, focusing particularly on issues of lifestyle and consumption-based
approaches to class. It focuses primarily on the UK, however.
Thomas, C. (1999) Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability. Milton Keynes: Open
University Press. This book explores important debates within disability studies and links these
to medical sociology and feminist perspectives. It offers an accessible review of a range of
contemporary debates and theoretical approaches. In particular, it focuses on the experiences
of disabled women, as told by themselves, and attempts to make sense of these (collective and
individual) experiences with reference to feminist and sociological ideas, and debates within
disability studies.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Education

The sociology of education has been concerned primarily with examining class
inequalities in educational achievement, and especially the relative failure of working-
class children in obtaining educational qualifications. Until recently, sociologists have
overlooked other important dimensions of educational differentiation – for example,
gender and racial differences in achievement. Feminists have argued that girls are
not only disadvantaged in the educational system, but that it is there that they learn
to be subordinate and to accept dominant ideologies of femininity and masculinity.
Girls are gendered; they come to see themselves as less important than boys. Despite
the wide publicity given to the fact that on average girls in the UK now show a higher
level of achievement than boys in formal education, the vast majority of boys and
a significant number of girls still hold the view that it is better to be male than female
(Reay, 2002). Specifically, school creates girls as ‘no good’ at mathematics, science
and technology. Girls are apparently channelled into particular subjects that are seen
as suitable for them and thus have their opportunities in the labour market severely
reduced as a consequence. Girls also become specific sorts of female. Being and becom-
ing, practising and doing femininity are very different things for women of different
classes and ethnicities (Skeggs, 1997) – ethnicity and class articulate with gender to
place girls and women in hierarchies of power.
What needs to be explained is how girls come to accept this. Feminist studies
undertaken in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s concentrated on how girls came to be
channelled into certain subject areas in spite of the equal opportunities legislation (the
Equal Opportunities Act 1975). With the introduction of the National Curriculum
following the 1988 Educational Reform Act, boys and girls now have to follow the
same curriculum. Nevertheless, the most recent research indicates that subtle pro-
cesses are still at work that result in girls making choices that tend to propel them into
‘female’ jobs and prepare them for subordinate roles in a patriarchal society, both at
work and in the domestic sphere (EOC, 2004). Furthermore, the most recent research
indicates that, despite anti-sexist work in schools and initiatives to encourage girls
into science and engineering, the situation has changed only marginally and patchily.
These processes are mediated by class and race, and girls do resist them. However,
the majority of girls end up in ‘female’ jobs – that is, jobs that are seen as ‘not for men’,
such as the ‘female’ semi-professions, routine non-manual work or ‘female’ service
work (see Chapter 9). They come to see themselves as having chosen these jobs, often
because they are women’s jobs; indeed, as more women move into an occupation it

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comes increasingly to be seen as feminine and thus ‘not for men’. Many girls continue
to see their destiny as marriage and motherhood, and while most envisage this as
being combined with a career or paid employment, others do not; for some Muslim
girls, for example, the norms of their community mean that it is unlikely they will engage
in paid employment after marriage. It is not just what happens in school that prepares
girls for their (subordinate) adult roles, but their experiences at home and with their
peer group and the opportunities that are available to them in the labour market (see
Lees, 1993; Bates, 1993; Reay, 2002). Mothers continue to play an important role in
influencing the educational success or otherwise of their daughters. However, for
working-class girls, even being ‘pro-school’ and having a supportive mother with high
aspirations for her daughter is no guarantee of high educational achievement (Lucey
and Reay, 2000).
Sue Lees (1993) has suggested four strategies that girls adopt in secondary school
– strategies that indicate the complex ways in which class, race and gender articulate
in structuring girls’ schooling. These involve:

1 Girls who are pro-school and academically or work oriented. They are oriented to
academic success and occupational careers and are typically white girls from
middle-class homes with strong parental support. (Subsequent work confirms this.
They have strong support from parents and the school and are able to envisage a
range of possible future career paths (Laurie et al., 1999). High examination success
characterises the majority of middle-class girls’ educational experiences, and
anything else is seen as failure (Walkerdine et al., 2001). The examination success
of pro-school working-class girls is nowhere near as good, however. The middle-
class girls typically follow from GCSE to A levels to university, while working-class
girls have more disrupted, fragmented and chequered educational careers.)
2 Girls who are anti-school but pro-work. These girls reject or feel rejected by the school
but nevertheless are academically and/or career oriented. This is a typical response
of able Black Caribbean girls, who reject the racist attitudes of school and teachers
but have a strong commitment to academic success and an occupational career.
3 Girls who are pro-school but anti-work. These girls value school life as a place to have
contact with friends and resist the attempt of teachers to harass them into working.
Resistance was expressed, in Lees’s research, both by disruptive classroom behav-
iour and by flouting the school regulations concerning dress, make-up and jewellery.
Girls in this group often argued that academic work was not worth worrying about
because they would only have part-time work, to fit in with family responsibilities,
while others indicated that appearance was more important for girls in obtaining
employment than academic qualifications. Some girls in this group also indicated
that the behaviour of boys had prevented them from learning and that girls who
resisted the boys were denigrated by other girls as well as by boys.
4 Girls who are anti-school and anti-work. These girls do not see school as a focus
for their social life and reject education and any orientation to an employment
career. The majority of these are anxious to leave school and get a job and are
already looking forward to marriage, motherhood and domestic labour. These girls
regard low-paid routine work as preferable to school and are deterred from an
employment career by their expectation that their major role will be raising children.

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In Lees’s research these girls indicated that girls who did not accept the inevitability
of a future as mothers and domestic labourers were deluding themselves.

There is strong evidence that in schools girls acquire appropriate femininity. Not only
do the majority strive to avoid labels such as ‘slag’ or ‘lezzie’; they also strive to take
on an appropriate feminine identity, within the double bind of being a normal pupil
and ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Hey, 1997). White middle-class girls have to strike
a delicate balance in the relationship between their femininity and their academic
success, while working-class girls neither have the ‘right’ femininity as measured
against the bourgeois ideal, nor achieve academic success (Skeggs, 1997; Dwyer,
1999).
Feminist research has demonstrated that schooling is centrally important in the
processes by which girls come to take on a complex identity that is feminised, racialised
and located within a class system. Schooling is an integral part of the patriarchal system
within which women take on subordinate positions – a system that structurally dis-
advantages women. This happens irrespective of the attitudes and values of individual
teachers or the policies of individual schools or local educational authorities (see
Jordan, 1995). Although anti-sexist policies can mitigate the impact, they cannot
eliminate it. Indeed, the within-school processes interact in complex ways with the
influences of the home, the peer group, the labour market and wider social and cultural
forces. These combine to ‘produce’ girls who are prepared to positively choose and
take on women’s jobs in a segregated labour market. While middle-class and Black
Caribbean girls tend to see their future in terms of an employed career and marriage,
working-class girls see it in terms of child care and domestic labour, possibly combined
with part-time paid work. The evidence from labour market participation would
suggest that Chinese and non-Muslim Asian girls, similarly, anticipate combining a
career with marriage, while Muslim Asian women tend to withdraw from the labour
market permanently on marriage.

Girls’ educational achievements

In recent years there has been a moral panic about girls’ ‘over-achievement’ in the
education system (Abbott, 2000), a success that is seen as a challenge to male
hegemony (Abbott and Wallace, 1992) and which has been cited by those who claim
we now live in a post-feminist society as evidence of a ‘genderquake’ (Wilkinson, 1994).
Frequently in the reporting of these issues no recognition is given to the huge
investment over the last thirty years or so in improving girls’ educational achievement
and, in particular, encouraging girls to continue into higher education. Rather than
celebrating girls’ success in catching up with and in some areas overtaking boys,
or expressing concern that girls are still not taking science, engineering and technology
degrees, concern is expressed about their ‘apparent’ success in education. Beyond
this, the widespread publicity given to concern about ‘failing boys’ does not acknow-
ledge that the educational performance of both boys and girls has improved, but with
middle-class girls’ performance improving at a faster rate than that of boys, enabling
the girls to catch up.

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Girls now generally do better than boys in school, as measured by passes in school
examinations (GCSE and GCE A levels in England and Wales; Standard and Higher
grades in Scotland); as girls and women have been granted more equal access to
education so they have caught up with boys and men at each level, and at some levels
they are now overtaking them. Young women obtain better results in 16+ examinations
than boys, and they are overtaking them at GCE A level as well (Table 4.1). In 2000/1,
40.6 per cent of young women obtained two or more A levels or three or more SCE
Highers, compared with 32.1 per cent of young men. This shows not only the gap in
achievement between young men and women but also the overall improvement
among young people in gaining credentials; ten years earlier, 31.4 per cent of females
and 27.8 per cent of males obtained one A level or more.

Table 4.1 Obtainment of 2+ A level passes or 3+ SCE Highers by sex, UK, 2000/1 (%)

Boys Girls Total

England 32.7 40.7 36.6

Wales 31.5 38.8 35.1
Northern Ireland 30.6 45.4 37.8
Scotland 32.8 45.2 38.9

Total UK 32.1 40.6 36.2

Source: www.nso.org

Female enrolments are fast catching up with male enrolments in higher education
too. Although the numbers in higher education in general have grown during the 1980s
and 1990s, the biggest growth has been amongst women; there are now two-and-a-
half times more women in the system than in 1970/1 (see Table 4.2). Indeed, in terms
of applications to university in 2001/2, there were more female applicants than
male ones. Even in postgraduate education, numbers of women going onto further
degrees have increased dramatically since 1980. In 1970/1 there were twice as many
male postgraduate students as female, but by 1992/3 there were only 11 per cent
more (CSO, 1995). Figures for 1994/5 (Department for Education, May 1995) indi-
cated that for the first time there were more full-time female students on first degrees
than male ones – 324.1 thousand compared with 320.6 thousand. Male students
continue to dominate engineering and technology degree courses, as well as computer
sciences; whereas women are over-represented in social, economic and political
studies, in languages and in education. (Men still outnumber women as full-time
postgraduate students – 43.1 thousand compared to 35.8 thousand – and on non-
degree full-time programmes – 58.6 thousand compared with 56.3 thousand.)
A study by Kim Thomas (1990) looked at how different subjects in higher education
are gendered. She compared undergraduates in Physics and English/Communications
Studies and looked at the different experiences of men and women in each subject area.
She found that sciences were seen as embodying hard, incontrovertible and necessary
knowledge leading to more serious, well-rewarded and prestigious careers. Scientists
saw themselves in a ‘subject hierarchy’ above ‘vague and wishy-washy’ subjects such
as humanities. The minority of women who studied such ‘hard’ sciences were very

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Table 4.2 Full- and part-time enrolments in higher education by sex, UK, 1970/1–1992/3

Males Females (%) Females

No. (000) No. (000)

1970/1 416 205 49

1980/1 524 303 58
1985/6 563 386 68.5
1992/3 759 685 90
2000/1 469.5 550.5

Source: EOC, 2004.

determined to succeed but nevertheless felt marginalised in the male-dominated and

competitive world of sciences. They were likely to see their career goals as conflicting
with family goals if they were to marry. They were never seen as totally successful
within physics and were often nonconformist in their behaviour within the science
establishment. By comparison, only a small number of students of English were men
but although this was seen as a more vague, indeterminate and ‘feminine’ subject
in the hierarchy of university values, men who behaved in an assertive, individualistic
way with strong opinions were able to do very well. Here it was the men who tended
to be less conformist. Thomas concludes that subjects were gendered in very particular
ways and that masculinity and femininity took different forms within them.
Women tend to become qualified in different subjects from men. Specifically,
there is evidence that women come to reject science, engineering and technology, and
indeed see themselves as lacking the ability to do these subjects at degree level, despite
the fact that women now outnumber men in these subjects at school. In 2001, 38
per cent of physics first-year undergraduates, 43 per cent in chemistry, 39 per cent in
mathematics, 20 per cent in computing and 14 per cent in engineering were female
(DTI: www.set14women.gov.uk).
Therefore, the expansion of higher education has particularly benefited women,
but women tend to be found in very particular sectors of education. It would seem that
removing the barriers from female participation in education means that women start
to do better at all levels of the education system. It has taken some years for women
to catch up at the higher levels, however. They are now doing so, but studies have
tended to show that they do not necessarily end up in the most prestigious academic
positions (these are still heavily dominated by men). Therefore academia is still
very much a male-dominated domain with women holding fewer chairs or senior
positions. Nor does a higher proportion of women obtaining degree-level qualifications
mean that there has been a significant increase in the proportion of women in the
high-status jobs traditionally dominated by men. In higher education, female academic
staff are concentrated in a narrower range of subject areas than men. The most gender-
segregated subject is engineering and technology: 88 per cent of full-time academic
staff and no less than 97 per cent of full-time professors in this subject area are men
(EOC, 2004). More generally, a much higher proportion of male than female academic
staff are in higher grades: 90 per cent of professors and 78 per cent of senior lecturers
and research fellows in the UK are male (EOC, 2004). By contrast, the majority of
entry grade lecturers and research assistants are women.

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In schools, 84 per cent of full-time primary and nursery teachers are women;
however, almost half (47 per cent) of full-time teachers in secondary schools are
men. In both the nursery/primary and secondary sectors, the female proportion
of teachers has been gradually increasing since the mid-1990s (EOC, 2004), but
women remain under-represented in the higher levels of the teaching profession; for
example, in England, seven out of ten secondary school head teachers are male (EOC,
2004).
Women’s jobs in the white-collar and service sector are the ones most likely
to need qualifications; highly qualified women tend to end up in the female semi-
professions (see Chapter 9). Indeed, some of the growth in women’s higher education
is accounted for by the fact that semi-professions such as nursing and primary school
teaching have gone over to graduate-level initial qualifications.
It is also necessary to look at what happens to non-academic girls. Here it is
evident that their main education is preparation for ‘women’s jobs’. Their aspirations
are shaped not just by educational failure but also by the expectations of their future
roles in the family. Many parents, teachers and employers ask: ‘What is the point of
girls striving for success at school when they will only get married and become depen-
dants of men?’ as do some girls themselves (Lees, 1993). Such expectations filter
through to girls, and domestic roles are seen as the alternative to academic success
for them. In reality they are likely to spend much of their lives in paid employment (see
Chapter 9), so this experience in the education system leaves them ready to accept
lower-paid, lower-status jobs without promotion prospects. However, there has been
something of a shift in attitudes. Research by Sue Sharpe (1995) suggests that while in
the past young women saw marriage and motherhood as an inevitability and the latter
as necessitating a break in their working life, they now expect to have jobs, babies and
a husband. Rather than marriage and motherhood being seen as an alternative career,
it is seen as a parallel career. However, Sue Lees (1993) argues that while academic
girls expect careers, non-academic girls anticipate part-time employment taken to
‘fit in’ with child care and domestic responsibilities. Mirza (1992) found that the Black
girls she interviewed anticipated a career, but this was in marked contrast to the
Irish girls in her study, who saw their futures as homemakers, childcarers and part-time
workers. For these girls domestic fulfilment and commitment to the full-time labour
market were seen to be incompatible.
In order to understand women’s situation in the education system it is necessary
to understand how gender interacts with race and ethnicity. What is evident is that
Asian and Black Caribbean women tend to have fewer academic qualifications than
white women. However, Black Caribbean women are more likely than Black Caribbean
men to have obtained GCSE grades A–C, to have vocational qualifications (a large
percentage in nursing), and their performance is improving relative to their white peers.
Furthermore, African-American women are also likely to be the higher achievers in
continuing education in the US (Mickelson, 1992; UN, 2003). The way in which women
perform relative to men in the educational system varies according to ethnicity (as does
the value of having or not having educational qualifications).
It is also important to recognise that, despite the moral panic about girls out-
performing boys in gaining educational credentials, social class and race/ethnicity are
much more powerful determinants of educational success.

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Gender [is] a less problematic issue than the significant disadvantage of ‘race’ and
the even greater inequality of class . . . in 1997 the gap between boys and girls
attaining five or more higher-grade passes was nine percentage points. The
difference between managerial/professional and unskilled manual was 49 per-
centage points . . . the data highlights a particular disadvantage experienced
by Pakistani/Bangladeshi and Black Caribbean pupils. Here girls attain rather
higher than their male peers but the gender gap within their groups is insufficient
to close the pronounced inequality of attainment associated with their ethnic
group as a whole.
(Gilbourn and Mirza, 2000, pp. 23–24)

Thus education is a gendered, class-based and racialised experience for girls and
boys, young men and young women. A result of the Macpherson Report (1999) was
the recognition that Britain is an institutionally racist society and this includes the
education system and the ways in which schools reproduce racialised inequalities.
It is important to recognise that educational success and failure are the outcome of
the complex articulation of class, gender and ethnicity. Beyond this, while girls from
all ethnic and racial groups outperform boys from the same group, there is wide
variation between groups. Taking the main minority ethnic groups in the UK, the
highest-achieving group at 16+ is Chinese girls, followed by Chinese boys, while
the lowest-performing are Black Caribbean girls and boys. The percentage point
difference between Chinese girls and Black Caribbean girls in terms of achieving 5
or more GCSEs at grades A*–C is 38.9, and the difference for boys is 45.8 (Table 4.3).
In general, from the earliest key stage assessments in primary schools, Chinese and
Indian children have the highest levels of achievement and Black Caribbean, Black
African, Pakistani and Bangladeshi the lowest levels of achievement. The differences
in achievement between boys and girls from the same ethnic background are generally
similar.

The history of girls’ education in Britain

In Britain, middle-class Victorian girls were inculcated from an early age with ideas of
self-sacrifice and service while boys were encouraged to be independent. Middle-class
Victorian boys and girls were separated at puberty, and girls were generally forced to
cease any vigorous exercise, to dress in a more feminine way and to curtail educational
activity. This was because it was assumed that women were inherently weak and
needed to reserve all their energies for their natural function of bearing children. At
this time boys entered the all-male world of work or the public school; they were
encouraged to increase their physical and intellectual activities and to become more
active and independent. Thus middle-class young people had a prolonged period of
education, but while boys went to boarding school or into employment young women
were kept at home and prepared for domesticity.
Schooling for working-class children, by contrast, was not made compulsory
until 1880, although the state permitted local school boards to build schools for them,
by an Act of Parliament passed in 1870, and had required that factory children be

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Table 4.3 Achievements at GCSE/GNVQ by ethnicity and sex, UK, 2003

5 or more A*–C

Number of 15-year-olds % achieving

Boys Girls Total Boys Girls Total

White 239,854 232,149 472,003 46.2 56.7 51.3

White British 233,151 225,855 459,006 46.1 56.6 51.3
Irish 1,093 1,111 2,204 58.4 61.8 60.1
Travellers of Irish heritage 97 64 161 43.3 39.1 41.6
Gypsy/Roma 90 138 228 24.4 22.5 23.2
Any other white background 5,423 4,981 10,404 46.3 58.2 52.0

Mixed 4,869 5,320 10,189 42.7 55.4 49.3

White and Black Caribbean 1,778 1,959 3,737 32.3 46.8 39.9
White and Black African 390 410 800 39.5 55.1 47.5
White and Asian 878 915 1,793 60.9 68.6 64.7
Any other mixed background 1,823 2,036 3,859 44.9 57.7 51.6

Asian 18,620 17,391 36,011 47.1 59.0 52.8

Indian 7,151 6,899 14,050 60.3 70.3 65.2
Pakistani 7,162 6,329 13,491 35.7 48.1 41.5
Bangladeshi 2,741 2,689 5,430 38.5 52.6 45.5
Any other Asian background 1,566 1,474 3,040 53.8 64.6 59.0

Black 9,208 9,737 18,945 29.1 43.1 36.3

Black Caribbean 4,159 4,403 8,562 25.1 40.3 32.9
Black African 3,790 4,145 7,935 34.1 46.8 40.7
Any other Black background 1,259 1,189 2,448 27.2 40.3 33.6

Chinese 1,082 967 2,049 70.9 79.2 74.8

Any other ethnic group 2,330 1,948 4,278 41.3 51.2 45.8

Unclassified 17,439 15,170 32,609 43.1 52.2 47.4

All pupils 293,402 282,682 576,084 45.5 56.1 50.7

Source: www.nso.org

educated for two hours per day by an Act in 1834. The main aim of education for
working-class children was seen as teaching them to be obedient, punctual, clean and
deferential to authority – to compensate for what were seen as the deficiencies of the
working-class family. Literacy skills were taught, but there was more concern with
moral education and discipline. While boys were taught gardening and carpentry,
girls were instructed in needlework, cooking and other domestic skills. The aim was
to produce a skilled and docile male workforce and more domesticated wives, mothers
and domestic servants. However, education was regarded as less necessary for girls
than for boys by parents and employers. Truancy was treated with greater leniency
when committed by girls since it was felt that if they were at home helping their mother
this was probably a useful education for them (Dyhouse, 1981).

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Generally it has been argued that schooling was made compulsory for economic
and political reasons, but Anna Davin (1979) has argued that in fact since women were
not able to vote it is difficult to see why they were included in mass education at all.
The explanation, she argues, is that this was a way of furthering the ideology of domes-
ticity, since education was the way in which the middle-class model of the family could
be imposed upon the working class (see Chapter 6). Education was designed, then, to
prepare girls for mothering, so that they would bring up a healthy, properly socialised
future generation. During the slow process of introducing education for girls in
the nineteenth century, two alternative models of female education emerged. In the
first model, based on the traditional view and embodied in the work of Miss Beale
at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, girls were equipped for their role in life as wives,
mothers and companions to middle-class men. An education was supposed to make
them more attractive to a potential partner by training them in domesticity and
the feminine arts. This helped to foster the nineteenth-century ideology of middle-
class domesticity. The second model was developed by Frances Buss at the North
London Collegiate School. Miss Buss argued that girls often had to earn a living if they
did not get married, and the usual career for a middle-class spinster was as a governess.
The girls of Miss Buss received the same academic education as boys. However, girls
were barred from higher education; Oxford did not allow women to become full
members of the University until 1920 and Cambridge not until 1947. After feminist
campaigns in the nineteenth century, they were finally admitted to special women’s
colleges – such as Girton at Cambridge. Some colleges gave them the equivalent
education to what was available at the men’s colleges, but in others they received a
different, less academically demanding intellectual diet.
The emphasis on differentiated curricula for boys and girls continued into the
twentieth century. In the debates over education in the 1920s and 1930s, arguments
concerning biological differences between boys and girls were used to strengthen
the view that their curricula should be different. The 1927 Haddow Report accepted
the evidence from teachers that girls were more passive, emotional, intuitive, lethargic
and preferred arts subjects, despite alternative evidence from academic experts
that natural differences in mental/physical capacity and educability were small and
not relevant to the design of the curriculum. The 1943 Norwood Report accepted
the view that while a boy’s destiny was to have a job and be academically successful,
a girl’s was marriage and motherhood, and for this she did not need academic
success.
The 1944 Education Act was the first formal recognition of the concept of equality
of educational opportunity – that ability should determine the type of education that
a child received. However, boys were (and are) admitted to the selective grammar
schools on the basis of a poorer academic performance in the 11+ examination than
was required of girls. If selection were accurately tied to ability at that age, then 30 per
cent more girls than boys would have gone to grammar schools (Weiner, 1986). As
far as less academic girls were concerned, official reports continued to emphasise the
importance of education for motherhood. The 1959 Crowther Report argued that the
curriculum for ‘less able’ girls should take account of their ‘natural’ domestic special-
isation, and the influential Newsom Report, Half our Future (1963), argued that:

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we are trying to educate girls into becoming imitation men and as a result we
are wasting and frustrating their qualities of womanhood at great expense to the
community. . . . In addition to their needs as an individual, girls should be educated
in terms of their main function – which is to make for themselves, their children
and their husbands a secure and suitable home and to be mothers.

Two models of girls’ education continued to exist in the early post-war period.
A small minority of middle-class girls received a grammar school education, while for
the majority of so-called ‘non-academic’ girls the emphasis was still on education
for domesticity.
In the 1960s and 1970s there was a general move to comprehensive, co-
educational schools, and this is the way in which most children are now educated. The
comprehensive schools were introduced as a response to research that had demon-
strated that the school system advantaged children who had fathers in non-manual
occupations. However, subsequent research, both immediately following the reforms
and more recently, indicated that comprehensive schools did not necessarily over-
come class inequalities (Ford, 1969; Abrahams, 1995; Hargreaves, 1996), and feminists
have questioned whether the strategy benefited girls.

for sociologists [the comprehensive system] has failed because it has not broken
the cycle of social and economic reproduction, for feminists it has failed because
it contributes to the continuing oppression of women, and for members of ethnic
minorities it has failed because it does little more than perpetuate the institutional
racism they confront elsewhere.
(Ball, 1988, p. 24)

In secondary co-educational schools the choices made by boys and girls become
even more sex-stereotyped – girls were even less likely to take science subjects
than in the single-sex girls’ schools. Furthermore, it has been reported that girls are
academically less successful in co-educational schools (NUT, 1980; Harding, 1980;
Kelly, 1982). It seems that in mixed classes girls were less able to develop an ‘ethic of
success’, were less likely to have female teachers and heads as role models, and were
more likely to come under the influence of stereotyped images of femininity which are
antithetical to academic attainment (Shaw, 1976). Consequently, some feminists have
argued for a return to single-sex schooling. Indeed, some studies have indicated that
women-only education may be in the best interests of women at all levels (Coats,
1994). Other research has questioned the extent to which anti-sexist strategies have
had any impact and challenged the view that a compulsory National Curriculum
reduces subject stereotyping (Arnot, 1989). The EOC has noted for instance that

Children develop ideas about the roles of men and women even before they start
school and these are often reinforced by many different influences including
parents, teachers and the media. As a result, subject and career choices may be
shaped from an early age.
(EOC, 2004, p. 1)

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Although the introduction of the National Curriculum removed many of the gender
inequalities in subject take-up which previously existed, the EOC goes on to note,
however, that

Decisions remain strongly influenced by gender and as optional vocational

subjects are introduced into schools, choices made generally reflect the traditional
pattern of the labour market. Few people choose subjects or jobs which they
associate with the opposite sex either at school or college or in the training and
careers that follow. In this way certain pathways through employment are
immediately closed down.
(EOC, 2004, p. 1)

Once educational equality was codified in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and
the Race Relations Act 1976, the concept of equality of educational opportunity had
been broadened to include race and gender as well as class. More recently there
have been debates about the situation of lesbian, gay, bi- and trans-sexual people in
education as well (Garber, 1994).
However, feminists have argued that processes within the school, the gendered
labour market and the pressures on women to take up domestic roles, albeit combined
with paid employment, mean that ensuring that boys and girls have the same curricular
choice, or even an identical curriculum, will make little difference to patterns of
inequality and that this is because of factors quite apart from whether boys and girls,
working class and middle class, are educated together in the same classroom. Miles
and Middleton (1990) point out that equal access to a common curriculum does not
guarantee equal treatment in the classroom and wider society. Hilary Burgess (1990)
concludes that co-educational schools are really boys’ schools and that girls have
to ‘fit in’.

Explaining girls’ continued disadvantage

Christine Skelton has pointed out that girls’ educational experience is different from
and unequal to that of boys:

Whether the focus of research has been on female pupils, teachers/lecturers or

students in further and higher education, the findings have all illustrated how
females receive and perceive different messages about their aptitudes and abilities
from those of males, which has implications for their place in the family and the
labour market.
(Skelton, 1993, p. 324)

Sandra Acker (1994) has indicated that feminists are not solely or mainly concerned
with issues of achievement. She suggests that it is now indisputable that girls per-
form as well as, if not better than, boys in formal schooling. The debate is more
complex, however. It is about differential curricula, the avoidance by girls of science

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and technology, sexual harassment, the career prospects of women teachers and
lecturers, the unequal treatment by teachers of boys and girls, and the weaving of
gender differentials into the very fabric of school life. Acker suggests that there is a
‘hidden curriculum’ of gender differentiation that continues to operate and influence
school processes despite the apparent gender neutrality of the official curriculum.
First, the academic hierarchy remains very firmly masculine (David and
Woodward, 1998). As noted above, the higher up the academic ladder we go, the
more dominated it becomes by men. Primary and infant schools are more likely to have
women teachers and women heads. At the other end of the spectrum, there are far
fewer women professors than male ones and hardly any female vice-chancellors or
college principals. In Scotland, for example, there are nineteen institutions of higher
education and only one female principal. Women are concentrated at the bottom
rungs of the professional ladder within colleges, and this applies equally to any level
of the educational system at which we choose to look. The proportion of female
primary head teachers has actually declined since the 1960s, while the proportion has
remained constant for men (Evetts, 1990). Furthermore, female teachers in secondary
schools are less likely to teach science and technology – shortage subjects, the teachers
of which are often given allowances to encourage them not to move (Acker, 1994).
Female teachers are therefore concentrated in posts as classroom teachers and less
frequently found in promoted posts. Teaching provides a job for female teachers but
the potential of a career for men. This means that the role models which boys and girls
have available are ones suggesting that men occupy positions of prestige and power,
thereby reinforcing roles found elsewhere in society.
Second, feminists have demonstrated that teachers have stereotyped attitudes
to boys and girls and that the school reinforces rather than challenges gender divisions
in the wider world. Ann-Marie Wolpe (1988) has argued that girls are encouraged to
behave in a feminine way, and teachers see it as part of their duty to inculcate properly
feminine standards of behaviour; she has argued that in order to bring about change
in girls’ education it will be necessary to review and restructure the whole educational
system systematically. Girls’ disruptive behaviour tends to be interpreted more
negatively than boys’, and when little girls ‘talk rough’ they are scolded or excluded.
Teachers refer to such girls as ‘real bitches’, ‘a bad influence’ and ‘little cows’ (Reay,
2002). Michelle Stanworth (1983) found, in her study of a humanities department in
a further education college, that in an A level class there was a tendency for both boys
and girls to underestimate girls’ academic performance and to regard the boys as more
capable and more intelligent. Male teachers, when asked what they thought their
pupils would be doing in future, tended to see even the most able female pupils’ futures
in terms of marriage, children and domesticity. When careers for girls were mentioned
they tended to be sex-stereotypical – personal assistants and secretaries – even when
these were not what the girls themselves wanted. However, the male pupils were seen
as having careers ahead of them, with marriage hardly mentioned. This expectation
of the teachers was in turn reflected in the expectations of pupils. Stanworth found
that teachers seemed to be heavily influenced by the verbal contributions that pupils
made in the class when making judgements about their academic ability, as were the
pupils when making judgements about each other. The teachers agreed with the
opinion of boys that they were more able than the girls and based this judgement on

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verbal contributions in the class, as the boys rarely had access to the girls’ marks. This
was despite the fact that some of the girls consistently got better marks for the written
work than did the boys. Boys continue to dominate classroom space and teachers’
attention (Francis, 2000) and to belittle girls’ contributions (Skelton, 2002).
Sue Lees (1993) argues that there is an increasing body of evidence that mixed
comprehensive education has increased sexism in schools. She indicates that teachers
do little to challenge the sexual harassment that girls experience from boys, while
Sandra Acker (1994) argues that many teachers do not challenge the view that boys
and girls are naturally different and that girls’ destiny is domesticity and motherhood.
Margaret Goddard-Spear (1989) suggests that teachers think boys are more intelligent
that girls. Her research demonstrated that teachers grade boys’ science work more
highly than girls’. She asked a group of secondary school science teachers to grade a
sample of written science work. The sex of the pupil was altered, and half the work
was presented as boys’ work and half as girls’. The most generous marking was by
female teachers of work presented as being by boys, and the most severe by male
teachers of work presented as being by girls. Valerie Walkerdine (1990) suggests
that teachers know that girls are more able academically than boys, but they continue
to undermine girls’ achievements. Male expertise and male values continue to be
presented in the curriculum as normal and dominant (Paechter, 1998).
Third, textbooks embody various assumptions about gender identities. Children’s
reading schemes have been shown to present boys and girls, men and women in
gender-stereotyped roles. Science textbooks are more likely to portray men than
women, and where women are portrayed it is again likely to be in a stereotyped way.
Research in the late 1980s and 1990s suggested that, despite some attempts to produce
reading schemes that are gender and race ‘fair’, racist and sexist schemes continue
to be used (Skelton, 1993). Reading material and texts across the curriculum tend to
portray boys and girls, men and women in stereotypical ways or, in some subjects,
to ignore the contribution of women (Skelton, 1993; Abrahams, 1995). Michelle
Commeyras and Donna Alvermann (1996) have demonstrated the ways in which
‘textual inscriptions can define or relegate women and men to particular gendered
positions and how the positioning serves to perpetuate imbalances in classroom talk
about texts’ (p. 31). They go on to point out that despite thirty years of feminist historical
writing this has had little impact on secondary school textbooks. School textbooks
and history curricula, with their emphasis on factual knowledge of key people and
political development in Britain, perpetuate bias and influence students’ interpretation
of and attitude towards women in general by marginalising and ignoring their role.
Indeed, they point out that the inclusion of one unit of non-European history in
the primary National Curriculum and one at secondary level led critics to claim that
too much attention was being paid to gender and race issues. Peterson and Lach
(1990) have indicated that despite thirty years of concern about gender stereotypes
in children’s literature little has changed. However, Jackie Bradshaw and her col-
leagues (1995) argue that educational software manufacturers have made considerable
efforts to exclude obvious gender bias from their products for primary schools.
They point out, though, that there is a problem when packages are being used to
deliver a content which is already gender-biased, and they found that gender-neutral
characters were often seen as male:

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The evidence for gender assignment is overwhelming, with ‘male as norm’ as the
dominant strategy. Simply stripping images of obviously sex-stereotypical features
does not rob them of their ability to carry gendered meaning. . . . Our findings
have potentially serious implications for girls, since the overwhelmingly male
identification at the initial stage may make it more difficult for girls to identify
directly with the images on the screen. The schema they bring with them already
worked against seeing ‘neutral’ characters and gave rise to a tendency to translate
sexual ambiguity into maleness. These readings may be one factor in the complex
process whereby from an early age girls learn that computers are associated
with maleness.
(Bradshaw et al., 1995)

Fourth, although most schools are now co-educational, gender differentiation

is nevertheless reflected in the organisation of the school. The outcome of gender
differentiation is that, while girls, especially in primary school, are the ‘model’ pupils,
both they and boys come to see boys as more important and to accept that it is
boys/men who must be prioritised and who ultimately have authority.
Gender is routinely used in schools to divide children into groups for activities
– for example, boys do football and girls do netball. Although in some schools girls
may do football, boys rarely opt for netball, and mixed team games are uncommon
after primary school. Segregation by sex is an administrative device that continues
to be used in the majority of schools and by teachers in the classroom. Registers, record
cards and cloakrooms are often divided on the basis of sex, and in primary schools
children are frequently ‘lined up’ as girls and boys and given separate activities.
Teachers consider separating children by sex as a routine and efficient means of
organisation.
However, organisation by gender is only one of the features of school life that
differentiates between boys and girls and reproduces ideas of ‘femaleness’ and
‘maleness’. The very organisation of the school continues to reinforce gender. Staffing
structures provide a model of male ‘superiority’, with the majority of authority positions
occupied by men. Head teachers, heads of department, science teachers and the
school caretaker are normally men, while classroom teachers (especially in primary
school), auxiliaries, dinner attendants and school secretaries are women – ‘women
teach and men manage’. Hilary Burgess (1990) has argued that the organisation of the
primary school mirrors paternal and maternal roles and reinforces the model of
women as maternal and natural carers controlled by the paternal male authority
figure. Primary classroom teachers are overwhelmingly female, while school manage-
ment (head teachers) are frequently male. Child-centred primary education increases
the identification of a class of children with a teacher as ‘my children’ (see also Reay,
2002).
However, despite the child-centredness of primary schooling, feminists have
argued that boys are advantaged – it is not so much child-centred as boy-centred
(Skelton, 1993). Katherine Clarricoates (1980) has demonstrated, from her observation
study of a primary classroom, that the key to understanding the way in which teachers
organise and structure classroom life is to recognise that their central concern is to
maintain control. Discipline is an important factor for teachers – both because it is

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necessary for them to carry out their teaching role and because of the expectations of
their colleagues. The outcome is that boys receive more contact with teachers than
girls because boys need more controlling. Teachers actually select material in lessons
that will gain the attention of boys; this is both to help in the control of boys and to
encourage them to work because girls score higher on tests. Not only the teachers but
also the girls and boys recognise that certain subjects are ‘boys’ things’ and others
‘girls’ things’. All of these are based on masculinist assumptions, which result in boys
identifying with science and girls seeing it as a ‘boys’ subject’.
Maarit Lindroos (1995), in a study in Finland, has argued that the ways in which
primary teachers interact with pupils produces different discursive spaces for boys
and girls. She suggests that girls are interrupted more often than boys by teachers,
as well as the teacher offering more space for the rest of the class to interrupt girls.
The ways in which teachers enable girls to make contributions in class also serves
to marginalise them, with teachers frequently interrupting them to make their points
for them. She points out that:

The boys did almost the same amount of talking as the teacher and used the
longest terms. . . . The teacher talked with the boys instead of the girls, who were
just an ‘addition’ or something timid and in need of assistance.
(Lindroos, 1995, p. 155)

She suggests that the outcome is that the boys are accorded authority while the girls
are encouraged to be co-operative.
Research in secondary schools has also demonstrated boys’ domination of the
classroom and teacher time (Lees, 1993). At secondary school level it is also argued
that girls and boys develop subject preferences that prepare them for their future roles.
Until the introduction of the National Curriculum the choices that girls made in the
secondary school, as well as parental and teacher expectations (Kelly, 1982) and
the ways in which the timetable and subject choices were organised, prepared girls for
‘female’ jobs and domesticity. Traditional careers advice and teachers’ attitudes tended
to mean that girls did not choose science subjects; it is often suggested that girls are
uneasy in handling science equipment and that they lack the familiarity with it that
boys often have. The introduction of the National Curriculum has meant that boys
and girls have to follow broadly the same curriculum until they are 16, science and
technology being compulsory in the primary as well as the secondary school. However,
this may have unintended consequences if the intent was to encourage girls to develop
more positive attitudes towards science and technology. To the extent that science
and technology are seen as masculine subjects, and teachers are likely to reinforce the
view that they are (Skelton, 1993), their explicit introduction into the primary cur-
riculum may well ensure that these perceptions are developed at a younger age.
The Association for Science Education found that there was little difference in
the background knowledge that girls and boys brought to secondary schools but a
significant difference in attitudes and interest, with boys already focused on physical
sciences and girls on biological sciences. The report concludes:

Teachers’ own attitudes to science will be transmitted to their pupils in day-to-day

classroom interactions. If women and men primary teachers display differing

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levels of confidence and enthusiasm in teaching biological and physical sciences/

technology themes, then the early introduction of these subjects may reinforce
rather than challenge the traditional gender bias.
(ASE Educational Research Committee, 1990, p. 4)

The most recent statistics on the relative success of boys and girls at GCSE
and A level show that more boys opt to take single science subjects (except biology)
than girls, with boys tending to outperform girls in the specific science subjects (except
biology) and IT, while the mathematical performance of boys and girls is relatively
equal. (Girls outperform boys in combined science awards with the exception of
SCE Scottish Standard science – www.eoc.org.)
The statistical evidence on girls taking science subjects at school and in higher
education indicates that, despite a number of initiatives designed to encourage girls
into science and engineering, there was little change between the early 1980s and the
1990s. While girls marginally outperformed boys in biology, chemistry, physics,
mathematics and IT at A level, the numbers taking the subjects were lower apart from
in biology. Of A level biology candidates 60 per cent in 2001/2, were young women
but only 23 per cent of physics candidates were.
In higher education more men apply for places on science, engineering and
technology courses (SET) than women, more accept a place if it is offered, and more
obtain the qualification. However, the number of female SET candidates is increasing;
between 1992 and 2002 the number of female SET graduates went up by 55 per cent,
compared with a 29 per cent increase among males. However, only a third of SET
graduates were female. There are striking differences between SET subjects, how-
ever. While one in five SET undergraduates is female, females account for 43 per cent
of chemistry undergraduates, 39 per cent of mathematics, 20 per cent of computer
science and only 14 per cent of engineering undergraduates. By way of contrast,
humanities and social science subjects at degree level, such as languages, education,
media studies, sociology and business studies, are female-dominated, as are the
degrees leading to careers in nursing and the professions allied to medicine, while
the proportion of female medical students is also now over 50 per cent. More girls stay
in full-time education after the age of 16 than boys, although boys are more likely to
have day release from an employer – reflecting the small number of girls who are
taken on as apprentices.
Why do girls and young women do so well within the education system? One
answer is that achievement and conformity at school contradict certain codes of
masculinity, especially working-class masculinity (Willis, 1977). Additionally, the
greater surveillance of girls and young women by parents also pushes them into
doing homework. Girls are denied the freedom to ‘go out’ in the evenings that is
extended to boys, and they tend to spend at least some of the time doing their
homework. This differential policing of boys and girls and the ways in which it
encourages girls to do homework is particularly evident in the fact that girls meet the
deadlines for GCSE coursework which boys often miss (Warrington and Younger,
2000). However, some girls are disadvantaged and have difficulty in producing
coursework or indeed in doing homework because of the large amount of domestic
labour and childcare that they are expected to perform at home (Lees, 1993; Bates,

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1993). Boys are generally not expected to contribute to the same extent – and, indeed,
girls may be expected to perform domestic labour for their brothers (Bates, 1993; Lees,
1993) – although some of the boys Sue Lees interviewed in London did help with
housework and thought that it was right that they should be asked to do so. Some
research has suggested that Asian girls may be particularly disadvantaged by the
amount of domestic labour they are required to perform, and other research (Bates,
1993) has indicated that girls may be expected to take time off school for housework
and childcare. In many developing and post-colonial countries girls are kept away
from school to help their mothers with childcare and other female tasks, including
agriculture, and are frequently unable to complete even primary education (see next
section).
Subject preferences can also be seen to influence the skill-based (vocational)
further education courses that young men and women take. Female-dominated areas
include nursery nursing, arts and crafts, family care, personal care, hairdressing, beauty
therapy and health care, while male-dominated areas are sports and recreational
studies, construction, manufacturing and production, oil, mining, plastics and chemicals
and transport. Business studies is also predominantly female. In 2001/2, 54 per cent
of young people studying Foundation Modern Apprenticeships were women, but only
3 per cent of these were on manufacturing apprenticeships, 1 per cent on construction
and 3 per cent on motor industry apprenticeships. In contrast, 97 per cent of those
in childcare, 94 per cent of those in hairdressing and 89 per cent of those in health
and social care were women. A similar gender split is found on Advanced Modern
Apprenticeships. In terms of achieving a vocational qualification, 95 per cent of those
obtaining one in engineering or construction and property are men, while 61 per cent
of those gaining one in information technology, 75 per cent in education, training
and lecturing, 56 per cent in art and crafts and 90 per cent in healthcare, medicine and
health and safety are women.
Judy Wajcman (1994) has indicated that the proportion of women taking
computer courses in higher education has declined in the last twenty years, while at
the same time information technology has become widely used in schools. She argues
that access to computing at home and in schools is dominated by boys, that computing
has become sex-stereotyped. She concludes that ‘the absence of technical confidence
or competence does indeed become part of the female gender identity as well as being
a sexual stereotype’. The evaluation of projects such as Girls in Science and Technology
(Kelly, 1987), Women in Science and Engineering and the Technical and Vocational
Education Initiative (Skelton, 1993) indicate that encouragement is insufficient to attract
girls to science and technology (see also Warrington and Younger, 2000.) As Jackson
concludes:

When we started there was a feeling that these poor unfortunate girls did not
know the delights of a scientific (or engineering) career, and if only we gave them
the information they would all be converted. What we increasingly discovered is
all the obstacles: peer pressures in schools, parental attitudes in some cases,
inability to get to the apparatus because the boys grabbed it. Now I think we need
to look at the training of teachers and the education of boys and men.
(Jackson, in Gold, 1990, p. 42)

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Other researchers have suggested that science and technology teachers see girls
as deficient, as lacking the necessary aptitude to do science and technology (Versey,
1990). However, the accumulating evidence is that the ‘ability’ to do science and
technology has more to do with the differential opportunities that girls and boys have
to tinker and play with construction toys (Sharpe, 1995) and the gender stereotyping
of subjects as boys’ and girls’ areas (EOC, 2004). Volman and Van Ecke (1995) suggest
that the problem needs to be reconceptualised – away from seeing girls as the problem
and towards seeing science and technology as the problem. The attitudes of girls to
science and technology do not reflect misunderstanding or prejudice, but social
realities. They conclude:

By starting from the assumption that girls are the problem researchers have
been led into looking at them as an object. They have concentrated on explaining
the ‘behaviour’ of girls. We think that approaching girls as agents, who can be
asked what they think and feel, makes more sense if we want to understand how
they experience mathematics, science and technology, different ways of teaching
them and how and why they are compatible or not with being a girl. We think that
this can help to avoid falling into the trap of concluding that education does not
really make a difference and that it is only misunderstanding of girls themselves
that they do not like mathematics, science and technology.
(Volman and Van Ecke, 1995, p. 292)

There are also different kinds of classroom interaction associated with the different
genders. Detailed analysis of the moment-to-moment interaction in the classroom
indicates that boys talk more and are allowed to dominate the classroom interaction,
and this continues even when teachers are consciously trying to overcome it (Spender,
1982). Skelton (2002) has suggested that teachers typically work to interest boys for
the sake of maintaining order. Goddard-Spear (1989) argues that boys are perceived
as more active learners than girls, dominate teachers’ time and are regarded more
highly by teachers. Feminist researchers have pointed to the importance of language
in the classroom. They have drawn attention to the tendency of girls to take a back
seat in the classroom and to be more hesitant in making contributions than boys. Girls
are often reluctant to speak in class, and diminished in the discussion which takes
place. The classroom becomes seen as a man’s world and girls are marginalised.
Furthermore, teachers often use sexist remarks and sexist language in controlling girls.
Katherine Clarricoates noted that:

If boys get out of hand they are regarded as ‘boisterous’, ‘rough’, ‘aggressive’,
‘assertive’, ‘rowdy’, ‘adventurous’, etc. For girls the adjectives used were ‘funny’,
‘bitchy’, ‘giggly’, ‘catty’, ‘silly’. It is obvious that the terms applied to boys imply
positive masculine behaviour, whereas the categories applied to girls are more
derogatory.
(Clarricoates, 1980, p. 161)

Sue Lees’s 1993 research indicates that the situation has changed little and, despite
the fact that they object to boys’ domination of the classroom and their disruptive and

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sexist behaviour, in the end the girls have to put up with it. Indeed, Jackson and
Salisbury (1996) suggest that teachers do little to challenge the disruptive, dominating
behaviour of boys in the classroom – although they point out that it is not all boys who
behave in this way.
Taken together, these indirect forms of socialisation are sometimes called ‘the
hidden curriculum’. While the overt message may be that the expectation of girls and
boys is the same, this is subverted by a different message underlying the curriculum.
In sum, until recently girls were disadvantaged in the educational system because
they were not provided with an education equivalent to that of boys. Although there
now appears to be more equality in terms of co-education and equal access, in practice
girls are still disadvantaged in that they are channelled into particular subject areas and
their participation is not taken seriously. This is on account of the ‘hidden curriculum’
which in the case of girls includes such factors as the organisation of the school, the
expectations of teachers, the content of textbooks, the gender balance in the academic
hierarchy and the way in which classroom interaction takes place. For both academic
and non-academic girls the consequence is that their career and job opportunities are
limited. Several competing models exist as to how girls should be educated. The first
model argues that they should be equipped for their lives as wives and mothers. The
second argues that they should compete on equal terms with men by receiving the
same education as boys. The third model argues that girls should be educated
separately as a way of better enhancing their academic performance.

Global inequalities in literacy and education

Research suggests that enrolment in various levels of education has generally

improved more for girls than for boys in post-colonial and developing societies; the
gender gap in education is closing in many regions of the world. Nevertheless, in many
areas the gap in educational opportunities between boys and girls remains wide. In
22 African and 9 Asian countries, enrolment for girls is less than 80 per cent of that
for boys according to the United Nations (2003) World Youth Report. According to this
Report, the divide is greatest in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, particularly for
secondary education; in these regions fewer than 40 per cent of secondary school
students are female.
Also, literary rates around the world have been increasing, although it remains the
case that by far the majority of the world’s illiterate population are women. Thought
to be a result of both cultural and economic factors, inequalities in illiteracy rates
between males and females are also at their most extreme in Southeast Asian and sub-
Saharan as well as West African countries. Improvements in girls’ literacy rates are
occurring in these regions only very slowly. In the 1970s, girls were 1.8 times more
likely than boys to be illiterate; by 2000 the ratio had dropped only slightly to 1.6 times
(United Nations, 2003). In 2000, Africa and Asia had the highest illiteracy rates in the
world amongst 15–24-year-old girls, at 29 and 19 per cent respectively. However,
while high, these figures represent a major improvement over the past generation or
so; in 1970 the illiteracy rate for girls was 72 per cent in Africa and just over 50 per cent
in Asia. The level of development in a country has come to be regarded as a major

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determinant of its level of literacy, particularly for women; although the situation
in developing countries has been steadily improving in this respect, the gap between
developing and Western societies remains marked.
Girls outnumber boys in schools only in regions where overall access to basic
education is high – such as in Southern Africa, Latin America and East Asia. Larger
gaps are noted in regions of the world with lower overall levels of education.
Educational access is notably lower in rural areas for both boys and girls, but par-
ticularly so for girls. In Niger, for instance, there are 80 girls for every 100 boys
in schools in cities, but in rural areas the corresponding ratio is only 41 to 100 (United
Nations, 2003). These differences are thought to reflect family expectations of future
returns from their educational investments. The Report concludes that

Faced with a choice, some parents elect to educate sons because there are more
and better-paying jobs for men than for women. Some parents invest less in girls’
education because economic returns will go to their future husbands’ families
after marriage. Disparities in educational access also reflect the lower value
parents place on education compared with household activities for girls; some girls
are kept or taken out of school to work at home.
(United Nations, 2003, p. 255)

Also, some parents may well be unwilling to send girls to school if the school is some
distance away, or if the teachers or other pupils are male. In Pakistan, for instance,
where schools are segregated by sex, a large proportion of girls living in rural areas
do not have a school within one kilometre of their home.
Studies have repeatedly shown that investment in educating girls and women raises
every index of progress towards economic sustainability and development. Despite
this, the UN estimates that two-thirds of the 300 million children without access
to education are girls, and two-thirds of the 880 million illiterate adults are women.
Although the educational gap has begun to narrow at primary level, female represen-
tation decreases at secondary level and beyond in many parts of the world.
A related factor is that fertility affects levels of educational attainment and vice
versa. Various determining factors appear to relate to the young women themselves
as well as to cultural, economic and family considerations (such as a pregnant mother’s
decision to withdraw her daughter from school to help at home or to supplement
the household income through paid work). A study in Bangladesh found that children
in small families stayed in school longer because they were not called upon to care for
younger siblings at home (cited in United Nations, 2003). (See Therborn, 2004 for a
discussion of similar issues in parts of West Asia and North Africa.)
Literacy and educational attainment among young women also positively
correlate with reduced child mortality; the more educated women are, the less likely
they are to have larger families, particularly at a relatively young age. In Kenya, for
instance, 11 per cent of children born to women with no formal education will die by
the age of 5, compared to 7 per cent of children born to women with a primary school
education, and 6 per cent of women with a secondary school education. Botswana,
Kenya and Zimbabwe, with the highest levels of female education in sub-Saharan
Africa record the lowest levels of child mortality (United Nations, 2003).

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Feminist perspectives on education

Liberal feminist perspectives

Liberal feminist perspectives have been very influential in education, and indeed it
was campaigns by liberal feminists that created opportunities for girls within the
educational system. They argue that girls should have an equal chance to be educated
in the same way as boys and that this will lead to equal opportunities elsewhere. They
measure their ‘success’ in terms of the higher achievements of girls: better examination
results and a higher proportion of girls entering higher education. However, these are
only successes when seen from a middle-class perspective, and although more girls
may be in the educational system this does not mean that they enter jobs as ‘good’
as those of boys (see Chapter 9). They simply enter feminine jobs at a higher level.
Moreover, dominant expectations of femininity also follow them through the edu-
cational system. Hence, radical and Marxist feminists argue that equality of opportunity
is not enough and more fundamental changes need to be sought.

Radical feminist analyses of schooling

Dale Spender (1982) has argued that knowledge taught within the educational system
is not neutral but rather that it reflects masculine assumptions about the world – for
example, about the role of ‘objective’ interpretations rather than subjective, intuitive
ideas, and about controlling nature through science rather than trying to live with it,
and about the importance of political leaders as opposed to ordinary people. The
school system, likewise, sets up teachers as ‘experts’ who pass on knowledge to others
and who have authority over others, who determine what is a ‘right’ answer and what
is a ‘wrong’ one. This also reflects a masculine view of the world – boys and girls learn
that the ‘great’ artists, scientists, writers and sociologists were men. Men are portrayed
as superior to women in all areas of knowledge, and women rarely find their experi-
ences reflected in this knowledge. Knowledge, in this model, is packaged into discrete
‘subjects’ which become either masculine or feminine, and students are not encouraged
to see the connections between them or to question these classifications. The impor-
tance of competitive striving for success in an individualistic way, which is embodied
in the education system, is for radical feminists an example of a male approach to
the world. Other ways in which patriarchy is reproduced in schools include the
ways in which boys come to dominate the classroom and teachers’ time and the ways
in which girls are sexually harassed in schools (Lees, 1993). The outcome of these
processes is not so much that boys have the chance to reduce girls’ possibilities for
success, but rather that girls come to accept male power as inevitable. Teachers
do not challenge the domination of boys in the classroom and their sexual harassment
of girls. Girls withdraw and police themselves (Measor and Sikes, 1992) and develop
strategies for coping.
Radical feminists have tended to focus on within-school processes and ignore
the wider structural factors. By focusing on girls’ experience they have ignored the
experience of many boys who do not dominate or sexually abuse (Wolpe, 1988), and

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they probably underestimate the extent of girls’ resistance (Measor and Sikes, 1992).
Sue Lees (1993) does quote in her research examples of boys who objected to the
sexual harassment of girls by boys and to the disruptive behaviour of (some) boys in
the classroom. A further problem with radical feminist approaches is their reliance on
‘patriarchy’ which, as we noted in Chapter 3, some feminists have argued conflates
description with explanation (Pollert, 1996).

Marxist and socialist feminist perspectives

Marxist and socialist (‘dual-systems’) feminists both argue that gender inequalities in
education need to be seen in the wider context of a capitalist society. The school in
capitalist society is the major ideological state apparatus that ensures that the relations
of production are reproduced – that is, that the next generation of workers graduate
not only with skills appropriate to the position they will take in the labour market
but also with appropriate attitudes. Thus it is necessary to understand how schools
provide different experiences for girls and boys so that gender as well as class relations
are reproduced. This takes place through cultural reproduction – including the way
in which those girls who develop anti-school attitudes and values and overtly resist the
authority of the school nevertheless end up accepting low-paid ‘women’s’ jobs.
Michelle Barrett (1980) has suggested that in relation to education three key
questions need to be answered:

1 How is education related to the reproduction of the gender divisions of labour in

capitalist societies?
2 What is the relationship between class and gender in schooling?
3 What role does education play in preparing men and women for a particular social
order – one structured by class and gender?

In answering these questions Marxist and socialist feminists have adapted the Marxist
theory of social class to analyse the question of gender relationships by examining
patriarchal and class relationships within capitalist society. The aim is to provide an
analysis of the role of education in creating a sharply sex-segregated, racialised labour
force and to explain the processes involved in this. To do so they have adapted theories
of social reproduction such as those developed by Bowles and Gintis (1976) and of
cultural reproduction such as that developed by Willis (1977). In the process they have
challenged the political neutrality of education, arguing that its structures and
ideologies are already linked to the needs of the capitalist labour market and dominant
class interests.
Bowles and Gintis (1976) analysed the way in which the school acts as a selection
and allocation device for the social reproduction of the class structure. The major
function of the education system, they suggest, is to produce a stratified and con-
forming workforce. Experiences at school prepare pupils for the labour market; for
example, pupil/teacher relationships and the hierarchy of authority in the school
prepare pupils for supervisor/manager/worker relationships. Different forms of
education provided by different streams in the school system prepare children for

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different levels of occupation. Middle-class pupils are encouraged to develop the

autonomy necessary for middle-class jobs, and working-class children are prepared
for their subordinate position in the divison of labour. Thus for Bowles and Gintis the
school reproduces the relations of production.
In England, Paul Willis examined the way in which class divisions are culturally
reproduced. He asked not just why working-class boys finish up in working-class jobs,
but why they see them as desirable jobs to take on. In other words, he argued that
working-class boys were not forced into unskilled manual work but positively opted
for it – seeing it as ‘real men’s work’. His study focused mainly on a group of twelve
‘lads’ in a school in Birmingham who constituted a small ‘subculture’. It was evident
that the lads experienced school not as a process of enlightenment but as a source of
oppression. They reacted against teachers’ authority by escaping from supervision
and doing the things they valued most: smoking, drinking, swearing and wearing their
own variation on the school uniform. While the teachers saw these lads as trouble-
makers, the lads themselves were effectively driven by their experiences in the school
to embrace male working-class culture. The lads were proud of their actions and
saw those who conformed to school as passive and absurd ‘ear ’oles’. The lads looked
forward to starting work, their subcultural values and expectations reflecting those of
the factory subculture.
Feminists have argued, in the same way, that school reproduces gender divisions;
it prepares girls not only for their place in the workforce but also for the sexual division
of labour. Ann-Marie Wolpe (1988) argues that the family and the school prepare
women for low-paid work in the secondary labour market and for domesticity. Michelle
Barrett (1980) has pointed out that women have a dual relationship to the class struc-
ture. The education and training women receive by virtue of their class background
prepares them for the places they will occupy in the labour market, but this is mod-
erated by the expectation that all women will take on domestic labour and childcare
and become economically dependent on a man. Thus working-class girls are prepared
for low-paid secondary sector jobs, while middle-class girls are prepared for semi-
professional ‘female’ jobs (see Chapter 9). Research by Bates (1993) indicates that
despite Equal Opportunities legislation and educational reforms the situation remains
largely unchanged.
Marxist feminists have criticised Marxist models of work-role reproduction for
not including any account of the reproduction of gender roles. They have examined
the experiences of female working-class pupils in order to understand the ways in
which they interpret and mediate the structures and ideologies transmitted by the
school. The aim has been to understand how working-class girls come to have a
particular definition of femininity which is constructed and negotiated in a competitive
education system in which they ‘lose out’. It is argued that the particular version of
schooling that working-class girls get puts them in a position where they freely choose
their own subordination – that is, they choose marriage and domesticity. The form of
resistance that working-class girls develop is different from that of working-class boys.
Girls form a subcultural ideology of love and romance – an exaggeration of the
feminine stereotype. Some girls experience school as dull and boring, and their hopes
for the future focus on romance, marriage and motherhood. Their ambitions are not
focused on achievement and qualifications but on leaving school, ‘getting a man’ and

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setting up a home of their own. Girls also signify in other ways their opposition to a
school system which aims to control expressions of femininity in the interests of disci-
pline and management. Girls use their sexuality to control the classroom; flirting with
male teachers, for example, can be used to undermine the teachers’ authority and
control. Refusal to wear school uniform, or adapting it to the current fashion, wearing
costume jewellery or certain kinds of shoes, are all forms of the same strategy.

Black feminist perspectives on education

Black feminists have been critical of the way in which educational theories are assumed
to apply to Black as well as white women (see e.g. Bryan et al., 1985; Amos and Parmar,
1981; Mirza, 1992; Phoenix, 2002). They argue that racism is as much if not more a
central aspect of their experience than sexism. The differences between Black women,
especially between Black Caribbean and Asian girls, who have very different cultural
backgrounds, complicates this argument. Indeed, the cultures of Asian girls also vary
considerably depending on the country from which their families came and the religion
of their family. However, Valerie Amos and Pratkha Parmar (1981) argue that all
Black women share a history of subordination and of being treated as second-class
citizens. They suggest that Black culture is blamed for the problems of Black people
– that is, the relative educational failure of Black children is said to be because of their
religion, their language, their communities, rather than being seen as a result of a racist
society. In particular, Black Caribbean pupils (and especially boys) are blamed for their
supposedly uncontrollable behaviour. Gilbourn (1995) argues that teachers have a
general view that Black pupils are a disciplinary problem and that this takes on a reality
for Black children, who are disciplined more frequently and more severely than white
children – not always with justification. He quotes one teacher pointing out how an
individual girl’s behaviour becomes a generalised view. Following on from talking
about one girl, the teacher suggested ‘I think there is a problem with Black Caribbean
girls in this school . . . I am not sure how to handle them, how to cope. You try hard
not to sound racist but some of them are very lively’ (p. 183).
In Britain, to understand the experience of Black girls in school it is necessary to
understand the racist, class and sex/gender system of which school is a part. Black girls
experience racism in school not only from white pupils and some white teachers, but
also from a racist and Eurocentric curriculum. Thus Bryan et al. quote the experiences
of a number of Black girls:

School became a nightmare for me. They poked and pulled at me. ‘Is your hair
knitted, then?’ ‘Do you live in trees?’

I remember my early school days as being a very unhappy time. . . . There was a
time when this teacher pulled me up in front of the class and said I was dirty and
that she was going to make sure that my neck was cleaned – and she proceeded
to do it, with Vim.

My memories of school are of being laughed at and everyone calling me golliwog.

(Bryan et al., 1985, pp. 62–63)

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They point out that the curriculum is racist and Eurocentric and Gilbourn (1995)
suggests that the National Curriculum has exacerbated this. Not only do the reading
books present women in sex-stereotyped roles; the majority of children and adults in
reading schemes are white. History is taught from the perspective of white Britain.
English books are selected on ‘literary merit’, which is judged from a white perspective.
Black people are often portrayed as inferior:

You will be getting deep into a story and suddenly it will bite you – a reference to
black people as savages or something. It was so offensive. . . . Sometimes you
would sit in class and wait, all tensed up, for the next derogatory remark to come
tripping off the teacher’s tongue: Oh yes it was a ‘black’ day today, or some kid
had ‘blackened’ the school’s reputation.
(Bryan et al., 1985, p. 65)

While few educationalists overtly accept the view that Black children are
genetically less intelligent than white children, nevertheless teachers often expect less
of them and Black children consistently underachieve at school. On the other hand,
Black Caribbeans are expected to do well at games and are encouraged in this area
of the curriculum. The result is that a substantial proportion of Black women under-
achieve at school and a relatively high proportion leave with few qualifications and
are propelled into the very same jobs that their mothers or grandmothers were
encouraged to come to Britain to take up in the 1950s and 1960s – dirty, low-paid jobs
in the secondary labour market (Gilbourn, 1995).
However, as with white working-class girls, some Black girls do resist racism and
ethnocentrism. Mary Fuller (1980) has argued that some Black Caribbean schoolgirls’
anger and frustration at the way they are treated at school leads them to a positive self-
image – a positive embracing of being Black and female. They aim to achieve good
educational qualifications, get decent jobs and move out of the subordinate position
that their parents are in. Gaining educational qualifications gives them a sense of
their own worth. However, this does not necessarily result in conformity to the norms
of the school. They conformed to the ideal of the ‘good pupil’ only in so far as they did
their school work. Apart from this their behaviour was designed to exasperate the
teachers. In the classroom they gave the appearance of inattention, boredom and
indifference; they expressed opposition to what they regarded as boring and trivial
features of school by, for example, reading magazines or doing homework in class.
They accepted the relevance of the school only in terms of academic benefit; they
were able to exploit the school system without becoming subordinate to it.
Mirza (1992) has suggested that Black girls’ academic achievement is due to their
ambitions for themselves and their willingness to work hard despite a lack of encour-
agement from teachers. She points out that the ambitions of Black girls are not reflected
in the jobs in which they end up. This is due to the location of the schools they attend,
the racialised and sexualised labour market and the careers advice rather than to Black
girls’ expectations of marriage and motherhood. The Black girls she interviewed were
committed to paid employment but made choices on the basis of realistic assessments
of their abilities and the opportunities available to them.

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Masculinity and education

The sociology of education in the 1960s and 1970s was gender-blind – either no
consideration was given to the different experiences of boys and girls in the education
system, or research focused exclusively on boys, or girls’ experience was interpreted
through the boys’ eyes. This meant that boys were constructed as the norm and girls
as different from the norm. Thus sociology failed to challenge the commonly held
view that if men/boys were not naturally superior to girls/women, they necessarily
became so, both because of their role as breadwinners and also because boys/men
needed to be constructed by the work and other demands placed on them (Abbott and
Wallace, 1992).
Feminist sociology was concerned with studying the experiences of girls/women
and challenging assumptions of male ‘natural’ superiority in education. In doing
so they studied not girls/women in isolation but the relationship between men
and women, highlighting the ways in which patriarchal power structured masculine and
feminine identities. In the 1980s and 1990s two male perspectives developed which
were concerned with understanding the construction of masculinity. The first,
associated with ‘men’s studies’, was concerned with men’s rights and argued that it was
necessary to study men in the same way as feminists had studied women – to bring
men in. This perspective ignored both the fact that much research had been by
men and about men and that feminist research had been concerned with the relation-
ship between men and women. Some researchers from this perspective have been
concerned to argue that schools are ‘anti-boy’/‘pro-girl’ (e.g. Moir and Moir, 1999)
– a position rejected by feminists. The alternative position is the study of men in the
terms devised by feminists – ‘pro-feminist’ studies.
A recent set of studies has considered how masculinity is constructed through
schooling. Taking their lead from feminist studies of schools that have explored how
femininity is constructed and perpetuated through education, these studies have
considered masculinity as problematic. Beverley Skeggs (1995), for example, argues
that masculinity is part of a set of codes and expectations found within the school
system. Mairtin Mac an Ghaill (1994), in an empirical study of how masculinity is
created within a school setting, found that the male peer group (with which the male
teachers colluded) encouraged an atmosphere of hostility, homophobia and misogyny
– in other words, male peer groups were created out of a resentment of gay men and
hostility towards women. He suggests that rather than such peer groups being
supportive, they tended to ridicule and intimidate boys who did not conform. In this
way masculine culture and peer groups within the school served to create and police
the boundaries of masculinity and ensure a heterosexual dominance. The ‘normal’
form of sex was intercourse with women, although women were discussed in an
extremely insensitive way and the young men did not actually want to spend any time
with women.

Ashwin: You have to prove yourself all the time. And it’s different things to different
groups. Like, everyone can look at a street gang and say, oh yeah, all their behaviour
is about being hard. But in the top sets it’s the same way, getting the best marks
and all that. That would be seen as ‘poofter’ stuff to the gang but it is acceptable to

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the top set lot. But it’s still about beating other people, doing better than them, and
you’re shamed if the girls get better marks. That would be real slack. You have to
prove to them that you’re better than them and the other boys.
(Mac an Ghaill, 1994, p. 93)

Other studies have suggested that harassment of women pupils and women
teachers is a routine part of school life so that confrontational heterosexual norms
were once again established – by the informal culture as well as the formal one. Mac
an Ghaill indicates that there were indeed a number of codes of masculinity and
that the middle-class and white boys subscribed to different ones than the Black boys
and working-class boys. He explains this phenomenon by arguing that masculinity
is in fact a fragile construct. Hence it has to be vigorously reinforced in these various
brutalising ways which tend to perpetuate a certain kind of domineering manhood.
Feminist studies in the classroom have shown, similarly, how formal and informal
cultures, including the culture of masculinity, work together to produce and manage
‘girls’. Ellen Jordan (1995), for example, has explored the ways in which boys in primary
schools operate with a definition of masculinity that has femininity as the subordinate
term, and boys therefore ‘need’ to dominate girls in order to demonstrate that they are
masculine, while Kehily (2002) points out that boys strive to avoid being labelled ‘gay’
in the context of compulsory heterosexuality in schools.

Conclusions

This chapter has tried to show the persistent inequalities existing in education and
provide some explanations for them. Although women’s performance in education
is very high and they are already outperforming men in many fields and levels
of education, women nevertheless do not get better jobs and careers afterwards. The
relationship between education and the labour market means that a set of assump-
tions and constructions of masculinity and femininity tend to affect both, and that
there is continuity between sexism and disadvantage in education and sexism and
disadvantage in the labour market. Future domestic roles play a part in depressing
young women’s expectations and career or education prospects, even though, for
contemporary young women, childcare responsibilities necessitate only a short break
– if any – in an employment career, and marriage in most societies is no longer seen
as a reason for giving up paid employment.

SUMMARY

1 Although young women are more likely to be qualified than young

men, they find themselves in parts of the labour market – notably the
service sector – where wages are lower and prospects bleaker as their
role in paid work is assumed to be secondary to marriage and
motherhood and, for many girls and young women, their orientation
to education comes to reflect these expectations.

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2 Vocational education and training tends to reinforce gender inequalities

by emphasising particular kinds of masculinity or femininity, in spite of
a formal commitment to equal opportunities.
3 Women’s careers are conditioned by the expectation of marriage
and motherhood, even though in contemporary Britain, childcare
is less likely to lead to a significant career break than in the past.
Contemporary young women expect to have everything – an
interesting job, children and marriage – rather than choosing between
a career and motherhood as in the past but this is not necessarily a
global pattern.

FURTHER READING

Brine, J. (1999) Under Educating Women: Globalizing Inequality. Buckingham: Open University
Press. This wide-ranging book considers the global dynamics shaping gender, racial and class-
based aspects of education. It rejects a ‘deterministic’ reading of global inequalities in education
and explores many of the collaborative and conflicting interests shaping girls’ and young
women’s experiences of education. It also considers opportunities for change and resistance.
Coffey, A. (2001) Education and Social Change. Buckingham: Open University Press. This text is
a sociological analysis of contemporary education policy and practice, focusing on the social,
political and economic context of changes and continuities in education in Britain in recent
decades.
Francis, B. and Skelton, C. (eds) (2002) Investigating Gender: Contemporary Perspectives on
Education. Buckingham: Open University Press. This book addresses empirical and theoretical
issues relating to gender and education, and provides a useful introduction to the diverse areas
of research within the field. It incorporates a range of contributions from various perspectives
and provides an excellent overview of recent developments and debates.
Jones, K. (2002) British Education 1944–2001. Cambridge: Polity. This book offers a
comprehensive introduction to the development of the British education system over the last
fifty years, taking account of the relationship between social institutions such as the school, the
workplace and the family.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The life course

Age is usually seen as a natural or biological status, yet historical and cross-cultural
research shows that the way in which different societies divide up the life course is
highly variable, as is the behaviour associated with different age groups. Feminists
have argued that age status is of particular importance to women, who are more often
defined in terms of ascribed biological characteristics than social achievements,
and whose identity is frequently defined according to their social role as someone’s
wife or mother. Feminists have also argued that men and women are ascribed, and
experience, the life course differently so that because women are defined largely
in terms of reproductive capacity and sexual attractiveness, women are thought to be
‘old’ at a relatively younger age than men (Friedan, 1993). Thus age-status transitions
serve to define different kinds of femininity and what it means to be a woman, even
though the categories ascribed may not correspond to the lived experience of many
women. In this chapter we look at various aspects of the life course including childhood,
youth, adulthood (often defined for women largely in terms of marriage and mother-
hood), middle age and old age, and consider how these are shaped by various aspects
of identity, including sexual difference (the difference between men and women – see
Chapter 2). There is now a burgeoning sociological literature focusing on each of these
aspects of the life course, addressing issues such as age stratification, variations in the
meaning and experience of childhood, ageing and particularly the implications of an
ageing population in many parts of the world.
As Macionis and Plummer (2002, p. 322) note, ‘age divisions are found across
all societies as a major means of differentiating people’. Although all societies seem
to have some system of age stratification, whereby there is an unequal distribution of
social, political and economic resources between different groups at different stages
in the life course, the nature and extent of these inequalities as well as the categorisation
of groups varies considerably between societies and across different historical periods.
Sociologists have argued that, however they are defined, attached to each stage of the
life course are a series of expectations governing social behaviour.

Childhood

Today, most countries in the world define childhood as a time of relative freedom
from the social, political and economic burdens of the adult world. Children are denied

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many of the rights enjoyed by adults but, by the same token, in many societies are
absolved of adult responsibilities such as the need to earn a living, to provide care for
elderly or dependent relatives, or to go to war. This is not the case in all parts of the
world, however, or throughout all historical periods. The social meaning and experi-
ence of childhood varies considerably. Until about a century ago, children in Europe
and the US bore many of the burdens of adulthood. Likewise, if we look at the position
of children in a range of contemporary developing and post-colonial societies, we find
many examples of children taking on the responsibilities and concerns we would
associate with adult life in the West. Childhood is therefore ‘a very different experience
across cultures and indeed even within one culture according to the class, gender and
ethnicity of the child’ (Macionis and Plummer, 2002, p. 323).
Some social scientists have argued that even in the West, the idea that ‘irre-
sponsible’ children are protected by ‘responsible’ adults is a myth as, in an age of high
divorce rates, working parents and an increasing level of exposure to ‘adult’ media
culture, children are no longer protected from the adult world. Smart et al. (2001) have
argued in this respect that while family life in societies such as the UK is being
transformed by high rates of divorce, the idea that such changes have given rise to
a deteriorating quality of life for children is misguided. They argue that rather than
witnessing the end of the family and of ‘protected’ childhood, the emergence of ‘post-
divorce’ and single-parent families has given rise to new experiences of childhood.
However, in addition to the pressures of consumer culture and of the ‘branding’ of
childhood (Quart, 2003), children are thought to be hurried through their childhood
by some (Elkind, 1981; Winn, 1983). Others have argued that the ‘hurried’ or ‘branded’
child thesis overlooks the fact that children in relatively disadvantaged groups have
always assumed adult responsibilities sooner than others (Lynott and Logue, 1993).

Global experiences of childhood

Macionis and Plummer consider several examples that illustrate the global diversity
of childhood in contemporary societies, including child labour, child marriage, children
and war, illness and mortality. As they note, work is commonplace for many children
in low-income nations and societies across the world. High-income societies are rich
enough that many people – including children – do not have to work. Many of the
goods consumed by children and young adults living in these societies (branded
trainers and clothing, for instance) are produced by child labourers living in less
privileged parts of the world, however. Indeed, the United Nations estimates that large
numbers of the world’s children work in conditions that are detrimental to their physical
health or psychological well-being, including dangerous industrial activities such as
mining; illegal activities such as prostitution, pornography or drug trafficking; or work
in extreme conditions of heat or cold, or in jobs that involve exposure to hazardous
substances or chemicals (www.un.org). Many of the world’s children are employed by
organisations that supply branded goods to corporations that are household names in
the West; particularly given the increasing popularity of ‘outsourcing’ manufacturing
work to countries with cheaper labour costs (see Chapter 3), a global division of child
labour is reinforced.

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Research by Russian sociologists (Barkhatov et al., 2002) has highlighted that

‘street children’ have begun to be recognised as a prominent social problem in post-
communist Russia:

Over the last ten years, as the country struggled with sweeping economic decline
and a shift in values, it has also had to cope with a side effect of this massive
transformation: homeless and neglected children. Away from home, deprived
of shelter and parental care, these children are becoming a new cheap workforce
and easy prey for the rampant criminal world.
(Barkhatov et al., 2002, p. 5)

The report found that children aged under 13 comprise about 50–60 per cent of the
total number of street children, and that approximately a quarter to one-third of these
are involved in prostitution or in the production of pornography. The researchers
estimate that most working street children in Russia are boys; the same is true of
children involved in criminal activities. Girls on the other hand are over-represented
in underage prostitution and some 100,000 girls and young women in Russia are
thought to be working as street prostitutes, as call girls, or as prostitutes in parlours
or bars and clubs. Barkhatov et al. (2002) are particularly critical of the prevailing public
attitude towards child prostitution, according to which ‘social stigma falls upon
adolescent girls compelled to engage in the sex trade, but not upon their respectable
adult clients’ (p. 10).
When asked about their reasons for working, twice as many girls as boys answered
that they ‘worked to survive’. The answer ‘I am forced to work under threat’ was
received four times as often from girls as from boys, and the majority of those who
said they worked to assist their parents were girls. By contrast, reasons such as the
desire to have more pocket money, food or an expensive consumer item were more
common among boys than girls. Many street children, especially young girls involved
in prostitution, worked under an adult ‘master’ – about 47.6 per cent of girls and one-
fifth (21.8) per cent of the boys were found to be working under the patronage or paid
protection of adults.
As well as undertaking paid work outside of the home, many children across
the world get married and consequently are required to perform domestic labour,
and to engage in a sexual relationship, from a relatively young age. Often for economic
or cultural reasons, early marriages (relative to Western norms) are pervasive in parts
of Africa, and South and East Asia (Therborn, 2004). In some countries, half of all girls
under the age of 18 are married. Countries with relatively high percentages of girls aged
15 to 19 years who are already married include the Democratic Republic of Congo (74
per cent), Niger (70 per cent), Afghanistan (54 per cent) and Bangladesh (51 per cent)
(UNICEF, 2001). As Macionis and Plummer note, ‘poverty is one of the major factors
underpinning child marriage’, which has several serious implications for the girls and
young women involved:

Child marriage may serve as a major life restriction, and can have a serious impact
on health. It can cut off educational opportunities. And for girls in particular (and the
rate of child marriage is very much higher for girls) it will almost certainly mean

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premature pregnancy – with higher rates of maternal mortality and a lifetime of

domestic and sexual subservience.
(Macionis and Plummer, 2002, p. 323, emphasis added)

According to a UNICEF (2001) report on child marriage, domestic violence is common

in adult–child marriages. Early marriage is also linked to child prostitution it seems,
as many women and children flee violent spouses and, being unable to return to
their parental home, have little option but to turn to the sex industry in order to sustain
themselves (Therborn, 2004).
Child marriages are still very common in many regions of the world where
decades of sex determination tests followed by female foeticide have resulted in a
bride shortage (Therborn, 2004). As Calvert and Calvert (2001, p. 242) have noted, in
some parts of India ‘even villages that lack running water typically have a doctor who
performs high-tech amniocentesis or ultrasound to determine the sex of a foetus’.
Therborn (2004) reports that given their traditional preference for boys, many Indian
families living in rural communities, and particularly in some of the more conservative
states such as Madhya Pradesh, often view sex determination tests and abortion of
females as a means of family planning. While the tests are illegal across India, the
law is frequently flouted and clinics offering them abound. India has a long history of
female infanticide; baby girls are poisoned, suffocated, drowned, starved or simply
abandoned and left to die. Girls are considered a liability because of the expensive
dowries that have to be paid at their weddings, but boys are an asset. Even the most
ineligible comes at a premium – commanding a dowry that can extend over several
years to a steady demand on the girl’s family for money and other goods. Refusal
to comply may lead to ‘bride burning’. Rather than increasing their value or importance,
a shortage of women means that, on the contrary, young brides are often subject to
domestic violence and abuse, and are forcibly detained in their homes to cook, keep
house and, above all else, produce male offspring (Therborn, 2004).
About half of the world’s refugee population are thought to be children (www.
amnesty.org) and, as they are often thought of as the next generation of ‘the enemy’,
children are often one of the main targets of war. Female children and young women
in particular are also at risk from rape and other forms of sexual violence – violating
and impregnating ‘their’ women being a tactic commonly deployed in war. Children
(both male and female) are also recruited or coerced into being soldiers.
For many children around the world, their early years are marked by sickness
and morbidity, and in countries with high levels of infant and child mortality, loss of
siblings as well. In countries such as Botswana and South Africa, it is estimated
that one half of today’s 15-year-olds will die of AIDS related illnesses (www.who.org).
But, as Macionis and Plummer (2002, p. 325) also point out, ‘many of the children in
sub-Saharan Africa find their parents dying of HIV/AIDS and this makes for large
numbers of what have been called “AIDS orphans”’.
Globally, girls have a greater chance of surviving childhood than do boys, except
where gender inequalities are at their most extreme. As Therborn notes, in parts of the
world such as

Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan female life expectancy at birth is slightly lower
than that of males; in India as a whole, the female advantage is only one year. But

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in the big Indian states of the north, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa, female life
expectancy is also shorter than male. This is an abnormal pattern indicating
mistreatment of females. Among the rich countries women tend to live 5–7 years
longer than men; in China and Indonesia the female advantage is 4 years, in Egypt
3 years, in Saudi Arabia 2.5 years and in Iran 2 years. The only social area in
the world resembling South Asia in sapping the superior biological strength of the
female sex is sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the AIDS-ravaged southern part,
but also including Nigeria and other West African countries.
(Therborn, 2004, pp. 110–111)

The gap between children from poor households and those from economically secure
settings is also more pronounced for girls. Boys from poor households are 4.3 times
more likely to die and girls from poor households are 4.8 times more likely to die than
their respective counterparts from financially secure households (United Nations,
2003). This greater vulnerability most likely reflects the lower probability of girls
receiving adequate medical care, or of being absolved of their everyday responsi-
bilities when they are ill. In poorer households, these responsibilities may include
a significant (or sole) contribution to domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning and
washing, or providing care for younger or older family members.
A study conducted at a family health centre in Bangladesh, for instance, found
that boys were seen more than twice as often by doctors as girls. In India and Latin
America girls are often immunised later than boys or not at all. In some places, boys
tend to be given more and better food than girls. Breastfeeding and weaning practices
are also thought to favour boys in many developing countries. Hence, ‘surveys of girls’
and young women’s health show that, globally speaking, childhood is a period of
relative inequality’ (United Nations, 2003, p. 25).

The changing status of childhood in Western societies

It is generally argued that in pre-industrial, Western societies there were no distinctive

phases of childhood and adolescence; rather, from the age of about 7 children became
part of adult society, expected to undertake work roles and contribute to the main-
tenance of the family (Heywood, 2001). Children were punished for crimes in the same
way as adults, being deemed morally responsible for their actions. By the nineteenth
century they had come to have a ‘special’ status, as the idea of childhood as a distinct
phase in the life course spread from the middle classes to the working classes.
Nevertheless, children of this age were still usually prosecuted in the same way as
adults. In nineteenth-century Britain for instance,

On one day alone in February 1814 at the Old Bailey sessions, five children were
condemned to death: Fowler aged 12 and Wolfe aged 12 for burglary in a dwelling;
Morris aged eight, Solomons aged nine and Burrell aged 11 for burglary and
stealing a pair of shoes.
(Pinchbeck and Hewitt, 1973, quoted in Muncie, 1984, p. 33)

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In pre-industrial Britain, working-class children in particular, whether they remained

at home or went into service, had little freedom. At the age of 6 or 7 years they were
sent away to work in other households as servants or apprentices and this continued
until they were able to marry, usually in their late twenties. The rising middle class
frequently sent their sons to be apprenticed, and from the sixteenth century increasingly
to boarding school, although the main growth of these came in the nineteenth century.
Middle-class girls were mainly kept at home, while the small number of girls’ boarding
schools trained girls for domesticity and marriage. Girls were controlled either by their
fathers or by their masters. Wages were nominal, and many girls would have been
expected to send money home to their parents.
In early nineteenth-century Britain working-class children provided cheap labour
in the factories. However, from the 1830s, Factory Acts limited the age from which
children could be employed (to 10 years) and the hours that young people could work,
effectively making children under the age of 10 economically dependent on their
parents. However, young people continued to work in paid employment well into
the1800s; young girls were frequently sold into prostitution, and the use of children
as chimney sweeps was not outlawed until late in the nineteenth century. Families
were often dependent on the wages of their young, and this situation continued up
to the First World War and beyond. Girls would also have been expected to help their
mothers with domestic tasks and to help in the care of younger siblings.
Welfare reformers were instrumental in creating an ideal of childhood through
their campaigns to save children from hard labour, from prostitution and vice, and
from other forms of exploitation by adults. In doing so, the concept of an ideal,
sheltered and innocent childhood was constructed with children, and later adolescents,
being segregated into schools and penal institutions separate from adults where they
could be reformed and ‘saved’. Campaigns to help young people were also based upon
the idea that their leisure time could be used productively in clubs and organisations
and that this along with special institutions for the young could prevent them from
developing bad working habits and falling into crime and sinful activities. Child welfare
reformers, whose activities were later institutionalised in social policy, therefore helped
to impose the middle-class notion of a sheltered and innocent youth onto other
sections of the population.
By the twentieth century, childhood had become identified by psychologists
and the medical profession as a crucial period of language and identity formation.
As the welfare state developed, children were singled out as particular objects of wel-
fare intervention, needing special diet, dental and medical assistance. The expanding
social services were concerned with the moral and social welfare of children, and the
education system began to concern itself not only with their erudition but increasingly
with their well-being more generally. Associated with this was the development of
various experts and professions specialising in the care, treatment and nurturance
of children and later of adolescents in Britain and other Western societies.
Other trends served to change the status of childhood still further. The decline in
infant mortality and in the birth rate after the Second World War meant that families
were able to invest more in their children in the reasonable certainty that they would
survive (Gittens, 1985). Under these circumstances, children became objects of fun
and pleasure for adults, a sort of household luxury. Children became the main purpose

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and focus of family life, so that rather than supporting families through their work, they
began to be seen as the dependants of families for whom other consumption priorities
should be sacrificed.
The separation of home from the workplace resulted in the (spatial and social)
segregation of women and children. The home in middle-class households was
supposed to represent a haven from the fierce competition of the marketplace and the
public world, in which men were supposed to seek solace and comfort, but in which
women and children were cloistered and sheltered. This middle-class, sheltered view
of home and childhood later spread to the working class.
Also from the late nineteenth century children began to be recognised as having
rights of their own. Various legislative measures were designed to protect the child
from his or her own family and from exploitation or neglect by other adults. However,
the welfare of children was also linked to their social control, and the 1908 Children’s
Act was intended both to protect children from becoming criminal adults and
to separate them in ‘reformatories’. ‘Problem’ children were to be both protected and
reformed. The young offender was handled differently from adult criminals, tried
in ‘juvenile courts’, and schools were supposed to monitor the progress of children in
order to identify ‘problem’ cases. This was partly because it began to be argued that
disturbed children would become delinquent adolescents. Hence, childhood came
to be associated with developmental and psychological stages which had to be
correctly negotiated, if necessary with professional help (Sapsford, 1993).
In the course of the twentieth century, Western societies developed a view of
childhood as something cloistered and innocent. Hockey and James (1993, 2002)
indicate that this view is associated with a subordinate and dependent status in an
age-structured society. Children came to be subject to a process whereby authority
remains in the hands of adults. In addition, this sheltering is associated with innocence
so that childhood is supposed to represent a happy part of a person’s life. The global-
isation of childhood (through mass-mediated fundraising activities and charitable
events, such as Children in Need in the UK, for instance) means that children in
other parts of the world are often presented primarily as victims of war, famine or
other hazards in contrast to the safe and happy world of Western childhood. The
Western model of childhood is therefore taken to be the ideal and the norm.
Female and male children are marked as different with different clothes and toys,
and are subject to different kinds of socialisation from birth, or even earlier. Until the
last few decades in Britain (and many other Western societies) young boys and girls
led institutionally segregated lives, having different schools, different curricula, different
youth clubs, and so on. Many of these institutional differences have been eroded along
with a move towards co-education in schools (see Chapter 4), but in other respects girls
and boys continue to be treated differently, and girls are often subject to more control
and surveillance than boys of the same age. Girls are often sheltered more than boys
from the real or imaginary dangers of the outside world or from sexual threats. This
sexualisation of adult contact with children means that children are segregated more
strongly from the adult world than previously, as a result of recent public anxiety about
their protection and of media coverage of child abuse and abduction cases. Girls are
seldom allowed to walk alone or spend much time on their own, autonomously, outside
of adult surveillance.

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However, this vigilance and anxiety on the part of adult protectors detracts
attention from the fact that children are most likely to be physically or sexually attacked
by the adults who are supposed to be protecting them. The tremendous psychological
anxiety roused by child sex abuse means that gullible or negligent social workers
or Satanic rituals are more easily blamed than loving parents. However, legislative
changes (in the UK and elsewhere) and the setting up of telephone ‘childlines’ for the
victims of sexual abuse have resulted in more sustained intervention to protect children
from adults, as well as a renewed debate about the status of childhood.
Reports of bullying and also of young boys raping girls their own age or older
women have also renewed debates on the question of what childhood is. These issues
have raised public anxiety and debate about the age at which children could be said
to be responsible for their actions, as well as denting their image as ‘innocent’. Much
of this debate illustrates the profound ambiguities in relation to childhood in Western
cultures. Children are supposed to have sheltered, innocent lives but are victims of their
own violent impulses and the sexually predatory actions of those who are supposed
to protect them. Many have more autonomy and wealth inside the home than pre-
viously and less autonomous freedom of movement outside of it, yet many have
access to global media and communication networks from their own bedrooms via
television and the internet. Young People, New Media, a report published by the London
School of Economics following research into young people’s engagement with media
culture found that two-thirds of children have a TV in their bedrooms, for instance
(Livingston and Bovill, 1999).

Childhood in contemporary Britain

While the proportion of children in the population in many European societies

such as Britain is reducing, the 2001 Census of England and Wales revealed that
children still make up a substantial number of people in the UK – some 11.7 million.
Nearly one in four (22.9 per cent) of these live in single-parent families, 91.2 per cent
of which are headed by their mother. Overall, almost a third of households contain
dependent children, and one in nine have children under the age of 5. More than one
in ten dependent children live in a step-family. The majority, though, live with both
natural parents (65 per cent). Many children live in ‘workless’ households; over two
million (17.6 per cent) live in households where there are no adults in paid work.
In Muslim households in the UK this is even higher, with more than a third of
children living in households in which no adult undertakes paid work. Muslim children
also experience much more overcrowding (more than two in five – 41.7 per cent
– compared with an average of 12.3 per cent) and one in eight Muslim children live in
a household with no central heating compared with an average of 5.9 per cent (one
in 16). High-rise housing may not be suitable for families with very young children, but
over 58,000 children under 2 years old live in homes two or more storeys above ground
level, and over 11,000 in the fifth floor or above (www.statistics.gov.uk).

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Sociological perspectives on childhood

Until recently, children and childhood have been relatively neglected sociologically
– for example, children were seldom questioned in sociological surveys, presumably
on the assumption that they are incapable of making rational responses in the same
way as adults (Lewis and Lindsay, 1999). But children have also been thought to have
a ‘privileged’ status (in the West at least), representing the future hopes and aspirations
of a society or social group and as such are accorded particular help and protection.
As we noted above, this has not always been the case, however.
In recent years, a burgeoning sociological literature on childhood has begun to
evolve, much of which has been concerned with the ambiguous status and changing
experience of childhood (James and Prout, 1997). Sociological thinking about children
has tended to reject biological or psychological definitions of childhood and, instead,
emphasises that childhood does not exist in any essential or universal form, but is the
outcome of the meanings attached to particular social roles, and largely focuses on
the social construction of childhood (James et al., 1998).
Traditionally, sociology has treated adults and children as theoretically different
kinds of person – with adults seen as complete, stable and self-controlling, and children
seen as incomplete, changeable and in need of (adult) control and supervision. Recent
approaches, influenced largely by postmodern ideas, have problematised this assump-
tion, however. Sociologists such as Nick Lee (2001) and Steven Miles (2000) have
argued that because children are now ‘growing up in an age of uncertainty’ (Lee, 2001),
childhood can no longer be regarded as a movement towards personal completion and
stability. Rather, careers, intimate relationships, identities, and so on are all increasingly
provisional; bringing into question the traditional sociological division between the
mature adult and the immature child. Social processes such as globalisation and, in
particular, the role of consumer culture and the mass media have been seen to be
highly influential in shaping the contemporary experience of childhood in this respect
(Miles, 2000).
Feminists have argued that sociological research on childhood has often placed
considerable emphasis on childhood as a socially and culturally homogenous experi-
ence and consequently have paid comparatively little attention to the ways in which
childhood is shaped by social class, race and ethnicity, disability, global power relations,
and gender (Russell and Tyler, 2002). Berry Mayall (2002) has argued that much like
a sociology for women, feminists should begin to develop a sociology for (rather than
of childhood); one driven by a political concern to overcome the oppressive social
relations that shape inequalities in childhood, both between adults and children and
between children themselves.
Feminist research on childhood has highlighted the relationship between gender,
childhood and consumer culture, in terms of the increasing market recognition of
‘tweenies’, as well as the role of ‘pester power’ and ‘branding’ in shaping the Western
experience of childhood (Quart, 2003). Children, it appears, are now a major source
of purchasing power and some sociologists have argued that childhood has become
subject to intense ‘branding’ by global corporations. According to Walls Monitor
(a marketing organisation that specialises in researching the demographics of the 5 to
16-year-old age group in the UK and the USA), there was a 38 per cent rise in pocket

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money between 1993 and 1998, with 28 per cent of this being between 1997 and 1998.
This corresponds with market research in the UK and the USA indicating that pre-teen
girls are twice as likely as any other demographic group to visit a shopping centre
at a weekend. As recent research on gender, childhood and consumer culture has
highlighted,

the commercial perception seems to be that women are never too young to be
self-conscious about their bodily appearance and to define their identity in relation
to a relatively narrow set of social and cultural reference points.
(Russell and Tyler, 2002, p. 628)

Indeed, research by Russell and Tyler (2002) focusing on a UK-based chain of retail
outlets called Girl Heaven (aimed primarily at 3–13-year-old girls) has emphasised that
in the context of consumer culture ‘the opportunity for girls to play with their femininity
is reduced to the purchasing of a series of products and make-overs that not only
separates them from themselves and each other, but crucially from the process, the
social experience, of becoming feminine’ (p. 631).

Adolescence

Just as childhood is a socially and historically variable phenomenon, so is adolescence,

although it too is usually assumed to be biologically defined. ‘Adolescence’ is some-
times portrayed as a phase in which people have to make difficult psychological
adjustments to the physical changes in their bodies. For girls and young women it
is particularly associated with the onset of puberty and with becoming physically
capable of bearing children. Many girls, particularly those living in Western societies,
experience adolescence as a period of increasing sexualisation, according to which
they come to be defined largely in terms of their sexual availability and reproductive
capacity.

Young women and sexuality

Throughout history, young women have been scrutinised with regard to their attitudes,
behaviour and general conduct in relation to sexuality. The setting and monitoring of
cultural and moral standards, often involving the policing of young women’s sexuality,
is conducted in private, in public and through the mass media. Moral panics are often
constructed in Western cultures over women’s sexuality. For example, young single
mothers have frequently been identified as a problem group and are often discussed
in an effort to find ways to alleviate the problems they are thought to represent and
cause. Inner-city disturbances and increasing crime rates have often been attributed
to the growing proportion of young single mothers for instance (Furlong and Cartmel,
1997; Griffin, 1997). This policing of young women’s sexuality is clearly not unique to
Western societies. In Turkey in the late 1990s, for instance, school authorities sent
girls suspected of being sexually active for virginity tests; if found not to be virgins, the

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girls were expelled from school (including young women the age of student nurses).
Only in 2002 was this practice outlawed by the Turkish Ministry of Education
(Ilkkaracan, 2002).
In many societies across the world, young women have little or no ‘youth’ and in
this sense it might be argued that adolescence as a distinct phase in the life course is
something of a Western privilege. As Therborn (2004, p. 215) notes, ‘most girls do not
have any youth in South Asia, and not very much in Indonesia, Central and West
Asia/North Africa either’. For example, one in every ten births worldwide is to a
teenage mother, but in some countries the proportion is considerably higher. Early
pregnancy carries a higher risk of death or serious illness. The United Nations reports
that in developing societies, girls aged 10 to 14 years are five times more likely to die
in pregnancy or childbirth than are women between the ages of 20 and 24. At least one
in ten abortions worldwide occurs among women aged 15 to 19 years, meaning that
at least 4.4 million adolescent women undergo the procedure every year; 40 per cent
of which are thought to be performed under unsafe conditions (United Nations, 2003).
In Argentina and Chile, more than one-third of maternal deaths among adolescents
are the direct result of unsafe abortions. In Peru, one-third of the women hospitalised
as a result of complications during abortions are aged 15–24 years, and the World
Health Organization estimates that in sub-Saharan Africa up to 70 per cent of
women hospitalised because of abortion complications are under 20 years of age
(www.who.org). In a Ugandan study, almost 60 per cent of abortion-related deaths
were among adolescents (cited in United Nations, 2003, p. 253). Also, as we noted
above, many girls and young women in developing, post-colonial or post-communist
societies are forced into prostitution or ‘sex tourism’ (see Chapter 8).

Young people in Britain

In legal terms the status of adolescence is ambiguous. In Britain, young people are seen
as responsible for their criminal activities from the age of 10. However, a young woman
cannot give consent to sexual intercourse with a man until she is 16, although a doctor
may give her advice on contraception and provide contraceptives before she reaches
that age. Gail Hawkes (1995) has argued however that the covert regulatory practices
adopted by ‘family planning’ professionals towards those whose lifestyles they deem
‘irresponsible’ often serve to discriminate against young girls on grounds of gender,
race and class ideology. Young men and women may marry at the age of 16 but need
their parents’ consent. A young man used to be liable to conscription into the armed
forces at the age of 16, but the age of voting for Members of Parliament is 18, and this
is also the minimum age for standing for election. The legal point of transition from
childhood to adulthood is 18 years – reduced from 21 in 1970.
In Western societies, it seems that (as noted above) kids are ‘getting older younger’
(Quart, 2003) at the same time as youth is getting longer and longer. This phenomenon
is described in Alissa Quart’s (2003) critique of the ‘branding’ of girls and young women
as adult women who like to ‘hang out’, and who construct their social identities and
friendship networks primarily in terms of consumer culture. The protracted period of
growing up which follows childhood is extending. As the years in full-time education

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increase (often through statutory changes but also as a result of more young people
choosing to stay on at school), as the number and range of vocational and technical
education courses increases, so young people spend longer and longer charting a
course through the complex maze of opportunities and possibilities. The numbers
going into higher education in Britain have increased too (see Chapter 4).
The fact that young people are increasingly found in education and training
rather than at work has changed our view of youth in Britain and other Western
societies. To put it starkly, in 1945 80 per cent of 14-year-olds were at work in Britain.
Now 80 per cent of 14–18-year-olds are in full-time education. We would now think
that people of this age are ‘too young’ to work, but (as we noted above) this is by
no means a universal view.
The general tendency in state and welfare legislation is to recognise young people
as independent actors – to give them more autonomy and decision-making power.
However, this is also a contradictory process since efforts to cut welfare expenditure
have meant that benefits have also been taken away from young people on the
assumption that they should be more dependent upon their families. This process of
increasing autonomy is reflected in the cultural and social experiences of young people
as part of a process of ‘individualisation’. This means that although young people may
be dependent upon their parents for longer and longer periods of time, they have more
autonomy and space within the home for longer periods.

Adolescence, youth culture and social change

The lifestyle and behaviours of girls and young women have begun to change in
this context; smoking and drinking have become more common, as have drug use and
involvement in crime (although women are still thought to be less criminal than men
– see Chapter 10). Women have also become more sexually active at a younger age,
although the average age of teenage sexual initiation varies considerably.
In the period after the Second World War, with increased affluence in the 1950s
and 1960s, considerable attention was paid to youth culture in sociology. Young people
were portrayed as ‘affluent consumers’ who were able to stimulate the culture indus-
tries (particularly producers of pop music, magazines and fashion) with their new found
spending power (Wallace, 1989). Media, political and sociological attention tended
to focus attention on specific ‘problem’ groups such as muggers, football hooligans
and drug-takers. These groups of young people were seen as deviant, as holding anti-
social values and as challenging adult society. In the 1950s it was the ‘Teds’, in the
1960s the ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’, followed by the ‘punks’ in the 1970s. During the 1960s
the ‘hippies’ – a more middle-class subculture – and the student movement rejected
middle-class ideas of the protestant work ethic and ‘respectability’ in a consumer
society. The problems with these groups were portrayed as problems of ‘the youth of
today’ in general. In this way the idea of adolescence as a universal phenomenon was
reinforced (see Chapter 12).
However, Marxist sociologists at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(e.g. Hall and Jefferson, 1976), analysing these subcultures, argued that they were not
examples of ‘universal’ problems of youth but rather of particular class formations.

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Thus the Teds and Skinheads were examples of working-class youth subcultures and
the hippies of a middle-class one, rather than a reflection of the behaviour, attitudes
and values of all young people. Feminist researchers were particularly critical,
however, of the relative neglect of women in sociological research on youth sub-
cultures (see Chapter 12). The ‘subculture’ literature does not take young women
into account, they argued; it focuses entirely on male subcultural activity. McRobbie
and Garber (1976) wondered whether this was because young women are really not
active in subcultures, or because they are rendered ‘invisible’ by male researchers.
They addressed this issue by arguing that young women are not present in male
subcultures, except as girlfriends and hangers-on, because they have their own cultural
forms of expression based upon the retreat from male-defined situations into an
alternative culture of ‘femininity’ based around the young women’s bedrooms and
being a ‘fan’ of popular cult heroes or music groups. These feminine cultures tend to
be negatively defined in the sociological literature:

They are marginal to work because they are central to the subordinate and
complementary sphere of femininity. Similarly, marginality of girls in the active,
male-focused leisure subcultures of working-class youth may tell us less about
the strongly present position of girls in the ‘complementary’ but more passive
subcultures of the fan-club.
(McRobbie and Garber, 1976, p. 211)

The behaviour of teenage women is at least in part an outcome of the ways

in which they are treated differently from boys. Because young women are seen as
more in need of care and protection, parents ‘police’ their daughters’ leisure more
strictly than that of their sons. This is linked to the dominant ideological definition of
‘appropriate’ behaviour for women. Sue Lees (1986) has also shown how boys control
young women in the public sphere through the threat of labelling them as sexually
promiscuous. It is expected that boys will ‘sow their wild oats’, but similar behaviour
attracts censure in young women and is likely to lead to derogatory labels (see Chapter
8). Indeed, this sexual labelling has less to do with the actual sexual practices than
with the extent to which young women’s behaviour deviates from the popular ideas
of femininity – for instance by the use of swear words or loud behaviour. To remain
desirable – a ‘nice girl’ – young women must suppress any real sexual desire and
conform to gendered expectations of romantic love, sexual passivity and monogamy.
This double standard serves to constrain the private and the public lives of young
women to ensure conformity based on a model of sexuality which ultimately takes its
form from the ideology of the nuclear family, feminists have argued.
Feminist sociologists showed that ideas of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ which
had been taken for granted as natural were in fact social in origin: these roles had to
be learned by young people. Feminist critics such as McRobbie and Garber argued that
young women did not ‘rebel’ in the way that young men did, but rather used romantic
fantasy as a source of escapism. Other studies such as those of Sue Lees (1986),
Christine Griffin (1985) and Claire Wallace (1987), by contrast, have argued that the
ideology of romantic love plays a more complex role in the lives of young women.
In many respects young women are not deceived by the images of life portrayed in

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women’s literature but have very realistic ideas of what married life might hold in store
for them. Second, they argue that young women do have access to a number of
strategies of resistance, which flout the ‘nice girl’ stereotype. Third, these studies have
emphasised the importance which jobs hold for young women, as a source of status
and independence both outside and within the family. Marriage and motherhood are
not their only goal in life. For example a re-study of the original 1980s sample carried
out in London by Sue Sharpe in the 1990s (Sharpe, 1995) found that in contrast to
the earlier study, the young women she interviewed no longer saw marriage and
motherhood as their only goal in life. More recent studies of young women have tended
to emphasise the variety of feminine identities available to them and the ways in which
they can switch between these, manipulate them or change them as it suits them.
These studies, in line with more postmodern feminist perspectives, have therefore
tended to emphasise the ways in which feminine identities are chosen rather than
predetermined.
Yet, on a more global level, the United Nations World Youth Report (2003) on the
situation of adolescent girls and young women emphasises the prevalence of negative
attitudes towards women; exclusion and discrimination; relatively limited access to
social resources such as health, education and employment (particularly in terms of
maternal health); and the extent to which girls and young women continue to be subject
to violence. The report found that

The status of men is higher than that of women in developed societies because
women’s unpaid household labour is still not seen as an essential and valid
contribution to the industrial economy. In other societies, girls and young women
are viewed mainly as ‘reproductive labourers’. They have fewer rights to political
and economic participation than do boys and young men, and they perform
essential work for which they are neither paid nor fully recognized. They still
live mostly in the private sphere, as the public sphere remains largely a male
domain.
(United Nations, 2003, p. 249)

Gender differences in literacy and education

Participation in various levels of education has generally improved for girls more
so than boys so that the gender gap in education appears to be closing in many parts
of the world (see Chapter 4). However, as we noted in Chapter 4, in 22 African and 9
Asian countries, enrolment in education for girls is less than 80 per cent of that for boys
(United Nations, 2003). The divide appears to be greatest in South Asia and in sub-
Saharan Africa, particularly for secondary education, in which less than 40 per cent of
secondary schoolchildren are female. Similarly, Africa and Asia have the highest rates
of illiteracy among 15–24-year-old girls, at 29 and 19 per cent respectively. In fact,
globally, female illiteracy rates are decreasing only very slowly – Wallace and
Kovatcheva (1998) estimate that in the 1970s girls were 1.8 times more likely to be
illiterate than boys, and by the end of the 1990s the ratio had dropped only slightly to
1.6 times. The figures for Africa and Asia, however, while relatively high, do represent

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a considerable improvement; the United Nations reports that in 1970 the illiteracy
rate for girls was 71.1 per cent in Africa and 50.3 per cent in Asia.
Yet, although the situation in developing countries has been steadily improving,
the gap between rich and poor nations remains significant in terms of girls’ and young
women’s literacy rates and educational opportunities. In all countries, young women
are over-concentrated in particular educational disciplines and sectors that tend to
lead to lower-paid jobs and a narrow range of occupational opportunities (see Chapters
4 and 9). Life chances for adolescent girls vary considerably in different parts of the
world but a general pattern seems to be that girls (as a group) are disadvantaged rela-
tive to boys in terms of education and literacy. What is clear from recent sociological
research, however, is that girls and young women often construct their identities with
reference to other agents of socialisation, particularly (in both Western and developing
societies) the mass media and consumer culture.

Young women and consumer culture

There is now a growing body of sociological literature that explores the relationship
between young women and consumer culture (McRobbie, 1994, 1996; Lury, 1995;
Radner, 1995) much of which emphasises that shopping occupies a pivotal place both
in shaping and manifesting this relationship (Ganetz, 1995; Falk and Campbell,
1997). Much of this material has tended to draw attention to the social significance
of themes such as ‘girlie culture’ and particularly ‘girl power’; to the ability of girls and
young women to challenge, resist, parody and ultimately undermine hegemonic
representations of what it means to be a young woman through various aspects
of consumer culture, and particularly shopping as a quintessentially ‘girlie’ pastime.
The term ‘girl’ is clearly a market of status in this respect, denoting both a positioning
within childhood or adolescence, but also a relatively passive designation within
a gender, class and racial hierarchy, one that the popular cultural theme of ‘girl power’
(associated largely with the all-female pop group the Spice Girls) attempted to re-
articulate (see Chapter 12).
Feminist analyses have tended to highlight the role of a concern with appearance
and the body – and the social construction of femininity largely in terms of how girls
and young women look – in shaping the relationship between gender and consumer
culture. Much of this work has focused on the extent to which the presentation of
a feminine body is maintained through the pursuit of social and cultural norms simul-
taneously governing women’s behaviour and appearance, as reflected in discourses
on beauty and cosmetics (Wolf, 1990), fashion (Young, 1990a), sport and exercise
(Bartky, 1990), as well as cosmetic surgery which, research suggests, increasing numbers
of girls and young women are undertaking (Davis, 1995). Such approaches emphasise
that femininity constitutes a mechanism for controlling young women’s behaviour
through appearance – through an emphasis on an ideal standard of femininity, but also
through the definition of femininity itself largely in terms of aesthetics (Russell and Tyler,
2002).
Other (more postmodern) feminist perspectives on gender identity and consumer
culture have focused instead on the importance of celebrating, rather than developing

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a critique of, women’s relationship to consumer culture (Nava, 1992; McRobbie, 1994;
Ganetz, 1995). Angela McRobbie (1994, pp. 175–178), for instance, argued for ‘a
reappraisal of the pleasures of femininity’. This approach tends to focus on young
women as creative consumers, as the subjects of consumer culture rather than as the
passive objects of marketing ideology. Such approaches emphasise that women are
able to resist, challenge and re-appropriate consumer goods in order to fashion their
own identities. Considerable emphasis is placed on young women’s ability to subvert
patriarchal norms, enabling a degree of resistance to prescriptive definitions of what
it means to be (and to look) feminine. Mica Nava (1992) highlights the ways in which
young women are able to use consumer culture for their own style creation, premised
on the conviction that, far from being objects of the male gaze, ‘the possibility of
aestheticizing the body has been primarily a privilege of women ever since the romantic
period’ (p. 73). From this perspective, consumer culture is seen as a ‘creative space’
in which girls and young women are able to develop their potential for symbolic
creativity and self-expression (Ganetz, 1995, p. 88).

Adulthood

Adulthood is largely associated with taking up full status in society – with having sexual
relationships, getting married, having children, holding a full-time job and living in
an independent household. Again, this is not a universal view, however – the concept
of adulthood varies historically and geographically and, much like the social meaning
and experience of childhood and adolescence, is shaped by a range of factors including
gender, social class, race and ethnicity, disability and global power relations. In
most Western societies, adulthood is associated with citizenship status – the right to
vote, to take out loans or to enter a legal contract. In some societies, such as in India,
a woman comes to be seen as an adult only when she gives birth to a son. In most
Western societies the transition to adulthood is not usually marked by ‘rites of passage’
as in traditional, non-Western societies, but there are ritual markers associated with
the process. These can take three forms: private markers (such as first menstruation,
first sex, first alcoholic drink); public markers (such as marriage or graduation,
eighteenth or twenty-first birthday parties); official markers (such as the right to vote).

Adulthood and sexual difference

These rituals take place in different ways and often have a different meaning for
women than for men. Entering adult society usually takes place a few years earlier
for young women than for young men since they generally marry earlier, have sex
earlier, and so on. For young women (particularly those in developing or post-colonial
societies) such life transitions are often accelerated and this is particularly the case
also for working-class women, while for middle-class young women life transitions
are often more protracted. This also varies across Western cultures – for example, in
Germany or Denmark young people generally get married and start households later
than is the case in Britain.

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These life-status transitions also have different meanings for different sexes. While
the beginning of sexual activity can be a source of great pleasure and pride for young
men, for young women it can be difficult territory to negotiate – a complex series
of bargains and transactions, sometimes involving coercion or physical violence,
or concerns about not being seen as a frigid ‘drag’ on the one hand or as a promiscuous
‘slag’ on the other (Cowie and Lees, 1985; Halson, 1991; Holland et al., 1994). Marriage
too has different meanings for men and for women, as do childbirth and parenthood,
since women have the main responsibility for these and often have to interrupt their
careers to care for children. Increasing numbers of women in Western societies are
raising children without a male partner for at least some period of time – as we noted
above, the majority (90 per cent) of lone-parent families are headed by women (see
Chapter 6).

Adulthood and the body

Although the bodies of both men and women change as they progress through the
life course, women’s lives are often perceived as more intimately tied to their biology
and reproductive cycles than men’s. As men are perceived as universally rational
beings who are defined in relation to their performance and action in the labour market
and public life, their reproductive functions and bodies are seldom referred to and tend
to be seen as relatively unproblematic. Women’s bodies and reproductive functions,
on the other hand, are constantly discussed and are often seen as in some ways
determining their lives (Ussher, 1989).
Ussher argues that in the nineteenth century women were seen as prey to their
wombs through hysteria, an illness thought to be caused directly by emanations from
the womb, and to their peculiar disposition to illnesses such as neurasthenia which
required them to take constant rest and special diets. However, even at the beginning
of the twenty-first century, women are still seen as victims of various biological pro-
cesses. If we begin with menstruation, women are frequently seen as victims of
‘raging hormones’ either because their ‘periods’ are just beginning, because they have
‘premenstrual tension’ or because their hormone levels are declining, in the case
of menopause. In each condition women are often thought to suffer from temporary
indisposition bordering on insanity. Thus premenstrual tension is often given as the
reason for moodiness or inconsistency at work.
On account of these biological ‘problems’, women’s life course is more likely to
be subject to medical intervention or to be seen as a kind of disease (see Chapter 7).
Women are often recommended hormone replacement therapy or hysterectomies as
a solution to menopausal problems. Women are given hormone treatment or special
diets for premenstrual tension or irregular menstruation. The fact that many problems
associated with such life changes can also be traced to social and psychological issues
is overlooked in the enthusiasm to find medical explanations and ‘cures’. For example,
Ussher (1989) found that premenstrual symptoms were very varied and there was no
one pattern or experience of them for women. For some women it was a pleasurable
and for some women a miserable experience. Some women did not even notice it.
Experience of menstrual tension depended to a great extent on what other things were

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taking place in a woman’s life. Nevertheless this ‘problem’ is frequently subject to

medical diagnosis and intervention.
Nelly Oudshoorn (1994) points to the ways in which science has constructed the
hormonally controlled female body and the ways in which medical science has come
to manufacture and mass-produce drugs (especially the contraceptive pill) in order to
control sex and the female body. The introduction of the ‘hormonally controlled’ body
concept, the idea that hormonal treatment can cure many of the problems from which
women suffer – ‘female problems’ or ‘women’s troubles’ – has resulted in the notion
that control can be exercised over women through their bodies from menstruation
to menopause. ‘Women’s problems’ – premenstrual tension, unwanted pregnancy,
hot flushes, and so on – can be controlled by medication. The natural female body
can be controlled by male scientific knowledge, and in the process women’s lives
come even more closely under the scrutiny of (patriarchal) medical science. This, of
course, reinforces the notion that women are different from and inferior to men and
in need of male (rational, scientific) control.

Imagine what might have happened in a world with different cultural and moral
attitudes towards gender and responsibilities for family planning and children. It
is not beyond imagination that we would have ended up with a male contraceptive
pill, a medical treatment for male menopause and a classification system of
multiple sexes.
(Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 151)

Ageing itself is a problematic process for women in a society which defines them
primarily in terms of the body, and which values physical attractiveness as the defining
feature of femininity. Losing this attractiveness is often a major source of anxiety, and
women are constantly exhorted through advertising to control their bodies with the
help of creams or potions, dieting, exercise or even plastic surgery. Although men are
also increasingly purchasing such goods and services, it is to women’s anxieties that
most of the advertising is directed.
Women who have passed the menopause are seen as having no use anymore
for their reproductive functions and therefore as uninterested in sex. Doctors are
more likely to recommend hysterectomies for them, and sex is often seen as of no more
importance to them. In medical textbooks their ovaries and reproductive organs are
seen as ‘shrivelled’ or ‘senile’, metaphors which imply that they are used up and useless.
Men’s organs, on the contrary, are never described like this, although they too undergo
physiological changes with age. The removal of sexual organs is never recommended
for older men in the same way that hysterectomy is for older women, as though they
had no use for such organs (Martin, 1987).
Women are classified as ‘premenstrual’ in their youth, as ‘pre-menopausal’ in their
thirties, ‘menopausal’ in their forties and ‘post-menopausal’ in their fifties, as though
the experiences of their reproductive organs define their lives and can be used as a
classificatory system for women generally. The menopause is seen as a loss of function,
a decline of some kind. However, women have more recently tried to redefine this life
phase and to see it instead as a new beginning, a new period of growth in their lives.
Far from it being associated with a loss of sexual activity, some women report that
sexual desire becomes stronger (Ussher, 1989).

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Women and motherhood

Similarly, women who have children find themselves defined in terms of their roles as
mothers and carers (see Chapters 6 and 7). Once pregnant, their bodies are the subject
of continuous examination and supervision by medical experts, and the experience of
birth itself is increasingly one controlled by technology and remote expertise rather
than by the woman herself, although considerable efforts have been made in many
societies recently to reclaim childbirth for women, in midwife-led ‘birthing centres’ for
instance. It still remains the case, however, that the time and location of the birth is
chosen frequently by doctors rather than by the woman herself.
On the other hand, childless women are often seen as frustrated mothers,
as somehow incomplete; condemned to a marginal life. Having children is seen as
women’s ultimate goal, irrespective of whatever else they may have achieved in life,
so that the lack of children often has to be explained by some ‘problem’ – the woman’s
psychological inadequacies, biological ‘failure’, or her lack of feminine qualities or
more often that she is a ‘career woman’ and therefore not maternal. Now that women
are able more easily to have careers, they are often described as selfish for committing
themselves to a career instead of having children. Men are not seen as suffering from
such problems, whether or not they father children.
These essentialist theories of femininity can be seen as ideologies and discourses
which construct women’s lives in particular ways – ways which are derogatory and
which see them as biologically controlled. This also helps to provide legitimation for
medical control and intervention in women’s lives – their problems (which can have
many sources) are explained and treated in terms of their biology. This reinforces the
idea raised in Chapter 1 that men do the analysing and it is women as the ‘Other’ who
need explaining. What needs ‘explaining’ is why their bodies are different from men’s,
which are seen as the norm. These biological discourses surrounding women’s bodies
help to prevent women’s sexuality or reproductive cycles from being seen in any other
way. Although they are presented as ‘scientific’, they in fact reflect a male view of the
world (Sayers, 1986).

Ageing

Broadly speaking, sociologists have developed three distinct perspectives on age-

ing. Functionalist analyses, drawing on the ideas of Talcott Parsons, argue that as
ageing disrupts the social order, society’s response is to disengage older people by
gradually transferring their roles and status to the next generation so that social tasks
are performed with minimal interruption. Much like the ‘sick role’ whereby ill people
are defined as ‘sick’ and hence absolved of their normal social responsibilities (see
Chapter 7), older people are granted greater freedom so that what might otherwise
be thought of as socially unacceptable or deviant behaviour is defined as harmless
eccentricity (Cumming and Henry, 1961). A functionalist perspective on ageing, also
known as ‘disengagement theory’, emphasises that social order is maintained through
disengaging people as they age, from their social roles and responsibilities, and
transferring these to the next generation.

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Sociologists have largely rejected disengagement theory in recent years. As

Macionis and Plummer (2002, p. 336) outline, this is due to its four main weaknesses.
First, large numbers of people cannot disengage from paid work because of financial
insecurity. Second, many elderly people do not wish to disengage from their estab-
lished social roles. Third, there is no evidence that the benefits of disengagement
outweigh its costs – in an ageing society, high levels of disengagement may be socially
dysfunctional – a point we return to below. Fourth, disengagement theory defines
elderly people as passive ‘victims’ of the ageing process, and recent sociological
research has emphasised that this is not the case.
This latter point is addressed most clearly by those who adopt a symbolic inter-
actionist perspective on ageing which, as Macionis and Plummer note, is almost a
‘mirror image’ of a functionalist approach. This is because, instead of disengagement,
an interactionist understanding of ageing focuses on the ways in which older people
actively construct the meaning and experience of being ‘old’. Also known as ‘activity
theory’, interactionist perspectives propose that what it means to be old is socially
constructed through the meanings that are attached, including those attached by
elderly people themselves, to later life. As Macionis and Plummer note,

Activity theory thus shifts the focus of analysis from the needs of society (as stated
in disengagement theory) to the needs of the elderly themselves. This second
approach also highlights social diversity among elderly people.
(Macionis and Plummer, 2002, p. 336)

Again, this latter point in particular is developed by the third main sociological
perspective on ageing – what has come to be known as ‘critical gerontology’. Critical
gerontologists emphasise the relationship between ageing and inequality (Atchley,
1982; Phillipson, 1982). Drawing on ideas and concepts derived from Marxism, they
highlight how different age categories compete for social and economic resources,
and how this contributes to age stratification. In most Western societies, middle-aged
people have the largest share of social power and status, while elderly people (and
children) have less and hence are at greater risk of social deprivation and poverty.
In a bid to keep down wages, employers often dispense with older workers in favour
of younger (and hence cheaper) employees. Critical or neo-Marxist gerontologists
have argued, therefore, that age stratification is central to the maintenance of capitalist
societies. Because capitalism has an overriding concern with profit, those social groups
defined as unproductive come to be regarded as second-class citizens. Highlighting
what conflict theorists call ‘structured dependency’ – the process through which some
people receive a limited share of social, political and economic resources as a
consequence of the relations of production (Vincent, 1996) – critical gerontologists
draw attention also to social diversity in later life.

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Feminist perspectives on ageing

Feminists have emphasised that age stratification is compounded by gender

inequalities, so that female children and the elderly are doubly disadvantaged (Arber
and Ginn, 1995). They have also highlighted the ways in which inequalities experienced
throughout the life course – in education, the labour market, the family and the house-
hold, for instance, as well as in politics – further exacerbate women’s disadvantage
in later life, increasing women’s vulnerability to poverty, to abuse and also to social
isolation and deprivation. This is particularly the case as women are disproportionately
represented among the increasing numbers of elderly people.
An increasing proportion of the Western world consists of elderly people. It is
estimated that in Britain, the population of pensionable age will have exceeded the
number of children by 2007 (www.nso.gov.uk). People live longer and birth rates in
many parts of the world have been falling. This is an issue for older women because
the majority of elderly people are women. The proportion of people aged over 65 has
grown both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the population of most Western
societies, including the UK. This shift in the age structure of the population will have
marked implications for society as a whole, and for patterns of social organisation.
Women outnumber men in the elderly population, and this discrepancy increases with
advancing age: at ages 70–74 there are roughly four women for every three men; at
80–84 there are two women for every man, and by 95 the ratio becomes three to one
(Walker and Maltby, 1997).

Ageing populations

The ageing population is often referred to as a ‘demographic time bomb’ because the
number of dependent children relative to productive age groups (the dependency
ratio) is increasing. Changes predicted for the twenty-first century suggest a dramatic
increase in the dependency ratio, often attributed to rising longevity as a result of rising
living standards, and advances in medical technology and provision. One key area of
concern is the health care system, and the increasing demands likely to be made on
it. Other social issues and implications of an ageing population include:

• an increased incidence of various forms of disability, and a growing need for health
and social services, and financial support;
• the need to rethink retirement, in relation to the changing shape of the life course, new
patterns of work and leisure in later life, and changing incomes of the elderly;
• an increasing prevalence of poverty, as a result of greater strain on finances for some
groups in old age as a result of living longer;
• changes in the family, and a need to rethink familial roles and expectations as the
‘young old’ look after the ‘old old’, and developments such as assisted conception
mean that older people may have children;
• psycho-social issues such as problems of isolation and bereavement, raising the need
for new meanings of later life and the need for communities of support;
• political issues such as the rise of the ‘grey vote’ and pressure groups. A new politics
of ageing may begin to emerge;

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• cultural representations of the elderly need to be rethought as ageing becomes

recognised as an increasingly varied social experience;
• the concept of community needs to address social phenomena such as the devel-
opment of retirement colonies (such as lesbian and gay communities in Palm
Springs, or gated communities in Florida and other parts of the USA).
(Macionis and Plummer, 2002, p. 328)

Just as the earlier stages of the life course are socially constructed, so too are
the later stages, sociologists have argued. Class differences are often important in
retirement for instance. Working-class retirement may often lack an ‘active concept
of retirement’, whereas middle-class retirement, with better resources, has led to an
expanding consumer market and culture aimed at attracting the ‘grey pound’ (Blaikie,
1999; Hockey and James, 2002). Social variations in the meaning and experience
of old age can be illustrated by looking at how older people are differently treated
at different points in history and in different cultures. Among the Venda-speaking
people in Africa, elderly people have a particular authority because of their perceived
proximity to the spirit world: grey hair is seen as a positive sign of status rather than a
negative one (Hockey and James, 1993). In most societies older men have more status
and power than older women.
In our own society, the treatment of later life can be shown to have varied consid-
erably too over time. Giarchi (2000), for example, identifies three main historical periods
– pre-modern, high modern (or Fordist) and postmodern or post-Fordist periods. In the
pre-modern era ageing was seen as negative, but it was not seen as being attached
to any particular chronological age – rather, it was seen as a general deterioration, but
also a sign of wisdom and authority. Although the old body occasioned disgust, the
old woman’s body excited particular disgust because beauty and love were associated
with younger bodies. Erasmus (1466–1536), for example, wrote of older women: ‘these
broken-down women, these walking corpses, stinking bodies. They display their flaccid,
disgusting breasts and sometimes they try to stimulate their lovers’ vigour with
quavering yelps’ (cited in Giarchi, 2000).
In the modern period, associated with industrial capitalism, a number of
transformations took place.

• First, old age was medicalised – it came to be seen as a medical condition requiring
medical intervention and control, despite the fact that most elderly people are
healthy.
• Second, the body came to be seen as a machine, one where the parts were wearing out
or breaking down. The broken-down, unproductive body was one to be discarded
or no longer used in the industrial process – it was relegated to a different area of
life. (Women, of course, are seen to have unproductive bodies when they have been
through the menopause; at a younger age than men they are seen as past being
productive workers.)
• Third, there was the development of the welfare state, which sections off old age
according to legal norms of retirement (between 60 and 70 in most European
countries – although in some societies such as the USA there is no formal age of
retirement) and entitlements to pensions and other benefits. In most countries

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women are compelled to retire earlier, despite the fact that they are most likely to
live longer than men and therefore for women the period of retirement can be
relatively long. The vast array of care systems associated with the development of
the welfare state serves further to relegate older people to being burdens, in need
of assistance and a drain on the productive population. However, many of the carers
are themselves older women over the age of retirement, as are those employed in
the care system. Both the carers and the cared-for are often women in later life.
• Other cultural changes included the change in the nature of family life, with elderly
people increasingly disengaged from the family (50 per cent of women over the age
of 60 live alone). The shift towards youthful fashions and the pre-eminence of the
ability to participate in consumer culture tends to marginalise older people who
have lower incomes (Giarchi, 2000).

The result has been a tendency to ‘infantilise’ the elderly – to treat them in the same
way as children: as having less authority, less status, as being unable to make decisions
for themselves, and as being people who are not suited for sexual activity. This latter
point is particularly gendered; while older women are often seen as sexually redundant,
older men are often seen as justified in their sexual libido as long as it is with younger
women.
Giarchi (2000) goes on to identify a third phase of post-modernisation in which
the life course is deconstructed and rigid demarcations of age begin to disappear as
life gets longer, and early as well as later retirement becomes more common. During
this phase (in relatively privileged sectors of affluent, Western societies), alternative,
pluralistic significations of age emerge with older people associated with a range of
activities including continuing education. However, the continuity of ideas associated
with modernity and Fordism tends to slow down the liberating potentialities of this
postmodern age, Giarchi argues.
The increasing numbers of elderly people and their changing position has led
to a questioning of the position of the elderly and the formation of pressure groups
such as the ‘Grey Panthers’ to defend their interests. In the words of Grey Panthers’
leader Margaret Kuhn: ‘Our oppressive, paternalistic society wants to keep the elderly
out of the way, playing bingo and shuffleboard. . . . We are not mellowed, sweet people.
We’re outraged’ (quoted in Giarchi, 2000). Consequently, many older people (particu-
larly those from relatively privileged social groups in Western societies) are challenging
the notion that they are dependent and lonely, that they are in ill-health or that they
are mentally confused or demented. Arber and Ginn (1991) argue that an increased
political consciousness may be developing amongst older people around such issues.
Many of the diseases of old age can be traced to environmental problems such as
pollution rather than old age per se and affect only some old people just as they affect
some younger people.
There is great variation in the experience of ageing however; while for many
people retirement may be a period in the life course marked by increased leisure and
freedom, for others it is one of deprivation and exclusion. This is particularly the case
in terms of the ways in which ageing is shaped by sexual difference (the difference
between men and women). The situation of women in later life in fact magnifies their
inequalities at earlier stages of the life course. This is linked to factors such as gender,

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class, race and how old they are (see the Black Report, 1978; Whitehead, 1987). Since
the Second World War, there has been a dramatic rise in the proportion of older people
living alone throughout most Western societies. In most countries, the older population
is predominantly female, largely as a result of sex differences in mortality. In the
UK, the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990 (implemented in 1993)
was intended to reaffirm the objective of allowing older people to remain in their
own homes for as long as possible, and hence to reduce the number of people in resi-
dential or institutional care. Other European countries such as Sweden and the
Netherlands have also implemented explicit policy objectives to reduce the use of
institutional care and in the US, a decline in the ‘institutionalisation’ of older people
has been attributed, in part, to increased use of home care and the development of new
housing schemes, including ‘assisted living’ units (Tomassini et al., 2004). However,
in the UK, over half of people living in communal establishments are women living
in residential care and nursing homes, and the majority of these women (87 per
cent) are over state pension age. According to the 2001 Census, there were two and
a half times as many women in residential care and nursing homes as men in 2001
(www.statistics.gov.uk).
Poverty is particularly a problem for older women. First, they are likely to live
longer than older men and to find themselves in the category of the very elderly, who
are generally poorer. Second, due to their interrupted careers in the labour market
and their positions, which are generally in lower-paid, lower-status jobs, they are less
likely to benefit from occupational pension schemes (Groves, 1992; Walker, 1992).
Older women are more likely than men to be living alone – nearly half of Britain’s 3.1
million one-person households are one-pensioner only and three-quarters of these are
occupied by a woman living alone (in younger age groups, male occupants outnumber
women by three to two). Single-person households are least likely to have amenities
such as central heating or sole use of a bath/shower and toilet. More than one in eight
single-person pensioner households do not have central heating, and over 21,000
pensioner households do not have sole use of a bath/shower and toilet. The experience
of old age is also shaped by disability; according to the Census 2001, 60.4 per cent of
pensioner-only households contain someone with a mobility limiting long-term illness
or disability (www.statistics.gov.uk).
Older people are more likely to be living in poverty than other age groups, and
older women are especially vulnerable to poverty in all societies (Storey-Gibson, 1985).

In addition to sex-based inequalities in income and household resources, older

women in general are more disadvantaged than men. . . . They are three times
more likely than older men to be living alone, and only half as likely to have a
spouse. Older women report more illness and long-standing health problems and
consult their GPs more frequently than men. . . . Older women are also more likely
than older men to suffer from psychological problems such as loneliness and
anxiety and to have lower levels of morale or life satisfaction.
(Walker, 1992, p. 181)

In Western societies, men more than women have traditionally experienced

the transition to retirement. As more women are undertaking paid work outside of the

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home, however, this pattern is changing, although sociologists have argued that
women do not ‘retire’ in the same way as men, and that when a male partner retires
a woman’s workload may actually be increased (Arber and Ginn, 1995).
As many societies place such a strong emphasis on youth, the elderly (and
especially elderly women) may encounter discrimination and ageism. Much like other
forms of discrimination, ageism can be direct (denying a person a job because he or
she is deemed to be ‘too old’ for instance), or more subtle and covert but no less
pervasive (like when people speak to the elderly with a condescending tone, as if they
were children). In her book The Fountain of Age, liberal feminist Betty Friedan (1993)
argued that ageism is central to Western cultures, and that women in particular are
subject to it, as they are often thought to be ‘too old’ at a younger age than men. Friedan
argued that older women are notably absent in the mass media; only a small
percentage of television programmes feature characters who are over 60. In addition,
when older characters are portrayed, they are often represented in negative terms
so that being old is perceived largely as a time of ‘disease, deterioration and decline’.
In sum, the experience of ageing is shaped by numerous transitions some of which
might be particularly problematic for individuals, such as those brought on by physical
decline. Other problems – such as poverty, social isolation and ageism – are social.
While the meaning of ageing varies historically and socially, for many people
(particularly women) growing old is an experience of increasing social disadvantage
and isolation. Feminists have argued that later life compounds many of the forms of
oppression experienced by women throughout the life course.

Conclusions

This chapter has examined the life course in relation to a range of male–female
dynamics and relationships involved in childhood, adolescence, adulthood and ageing.
It has considered a range of issues relating to sexuality and motherhood, the labour
market, education, consumer culture, the body and the consequences of an ageing
society. It has also considered these various issues in terms of social stratification and
inequalities, and the politics and economics of global power relations, and how these
shape the social meaning and experience of being a child, an adolescent, an adult or
an older person. The various inequalities considered here are not superficial, but are
embedded within social structures and cultural values, as well as in the relationship
between production and reproduction, and between family responsibilities and paid
work.
In some parts of the world, improved social opportunities for girls and young
women have built up expectations of greater equality in both working and family life,
which may be frustrated by lived experiences of the labour market and of male
behaviour. This requires young women in the West to somehow resolve the conflict
between the often incompatible goals of a competitive labour market and motherhood.
In societies such as the UK, gender is of less significance in determining a person’s life
chances than in developing or post-colonial societies. Even within these more affluent
societies, young women of lower socio-economic status or of particular ethnic or
national origins still tend to have relatively limited opportunities.

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Inequalities between men and women undermine development and prospects

for reducing poverty; studies show that societies in which discrimination against girls
and women is greatest experience more poverty, slower economic development and
a lower quality of life than do less oppressive societies. As the United Nations report
on the situation of girls and young women concludes:

The world is witnessing significant changes, many of which are increasing the
level of vulnerability among girls and young women. Depression, eating disorders,
suicide attempts and other psychological problems have all become more com-
mon in developed countries, threatening girls and young women who are in
the process of establishing adult female identities. Girls and young women
in developing countries are vulnerable to the health risks that emerge in
connection with inadequate food and medical services.
(United Nations, 2003, p. 266)

In many cultures, boys are valued more than girls from birth or even earlier, and
this pattern continues throughout the life course. Many adolescent girls and adult
women as well as older women continue to be defined according to patriarchal norms
which construct femininity largely in terms of the needs of men. Sociological research
emphasises that women’s lives are often defined in terms of age stages, which are
seen as ‘natural’. At each stage of the life course women are often thought to be con-
trolled by their biology, and particularly their hormones. Feminists have challenged
this and argued that life stages for women are socially constructed, as they are for men.
Malestream theories have either not challenged biological explanations for women or
have constructed the ‘scientific’ knowledge which sustains the view that women are
controlled by their biology. Feminists have argued that men have used this knowledge
to reinforce their power over women, in medicine and health care, for instance;
knowledge about women (including social scientific knowledge) constructed by men
has been used to control and subordinate them.
In various parts of the world, a pattern of life course convergence is occurring
between men and women. In some Western societies, in particular, this convergence
is taking place with regard to educational experiences and attainment, work and career
opportunities, and lifestyles. However, those girls and young women and older women
who are exposed to a relatively poor quality of life tend to experience high levels of
vulnerability to poverty, violence and abuse; in Western societies, immigrant and ethnic
minority women are the worst affected; in other parts of the world, women from a
range of social backgrounds continue to be subject to a range of inequalities and forms
of oppression throughout the life course.

SUMMARY
1 Key stages in the life course – childhood, adolescence, adulthood and
ageing – are socially, culturally and historically variable, and are shaped
by a range of other aspects of identity including social class, disability,
global power relations and sexual difference.

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2 Throughout the life course women experience a range of inequalities

and forms of oppression.
3 Women are more often defined in relation to their bodies, and their
physical attributes, than men.
4 Old age is particularly a problem for women because the majority of the
elderly are women and the majority of the poor elderly are women.
5 The numbers of elderly, especially elderly women, are increasing.
6 On the one hand, the crisis of the welfare systems in Europe means
that there may be less scope for caring for the elderly in future and
there are concerns about how to pay their pensions; however, there are
also ‘postmodernising’ tendencies which could lead to the liberation of
elderly people.

FURTHER READING

Arber, S. and Ginn, J. (eds) (1995) Connecting Gender and Ageing: A Sociological Approach.
Buckingham: Open University Press. This book focuses specifically on the gendered meaning
and experience of ageing, considering the effects of ageing on men and women’s social roles,
relationships and identities.
Hockey, J. and James, A. (2002) Social Identities Across The Life Course. London: Palgrave. This
text draws on sociological, anthropological and social policy perspectives on the life course. It
also considers postmodern perspectives on self and identity in relation to childhood, youth,
adulthood and ageing, focusing on themes such as sexuality, consumer culture and the body.
James, A., Jenks, C. and Prout, A. (1998) Theorising Childhood. Cambridge: Polity. This is a key
text in the developing ‘sociology of childhood’ literature that outlines sociological perspectives
on childhood, as well as considering variations in the meaning and experience of being a child.
United Nations (2003) World Youth Report. Vienna: United Nations. (www.un.org/esa/socdev/
unyin/wyr/index.html). This report focuses on the situation of young men and women in terms
of global power relations, and includes a detailed study specifically of girls and young women.

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 CHAPTER SIX

The family and the household

The family is a concept that is familiar to all of us in some form or another. Most people
regard themselves as members of one or more families and the family forms to which
we belong can be very diverse. What we think of as a family can vary enormously in
terms of co-residence, economic relations, roles and responsibilities, sexual orientation
and reproduction; the family is clearly a dynamic social phenomenon – one that varies
historically, geographically and culturally.
Yet, in market societies at least, we are constantly bombarded with images of a
particular type of family – what anthropologist Edmund Leach (1967) called ‘the cereal-
packet family’ – consisting of a breadwinner husband and his children, all being cared
for by a smiling wife. We come to think of this as the normal, natural and inevitable
family form. In fact only one in twenty households in contemporary Britain consists
of a father in paid employment, a dependent wife and two children.
In order to understand something of the complexity of domestic life we need to
distinguish ‘the family’ – a group of relatives – from ‘the household’ – a more technical
term used to describe people living in one home, who may or may not be related. The
nuclear family (in the form of the cereal-packet family) is often the unit which is
assumed in advertising, housing and social policy, and it is to this that we shall mainly
be referring here. However, it is important to emphasise from the outset that this is
an ideal – an ideal which does not necessarily fit the reality, and one which is not
descriptively neutral but value-laden. Dianne Gittens, in challenging the view that the
family is a universal institution which performs essential functions for individuals and
societies, has pointed out that:

Social recognition of mating and of parenthood is obviously intimately bound

up with social definitions and customs of marriage. It is often assumed that, in spite
of a variety of marriage customs and laws, marriage as a binding relationship
between a man and a woman is universal. Yet it is estimated that only ten per cent
of all marriages in the world are actually monogamous; polygyny and polyandry
are common in many societies, just as serial monogamy is becoming increasingly
common in our own. Marriage is not always a heterosexual relationship. The Nuer
. . . practise a custom known as ‘ghost marriages’ whereby when an unmarried or
childless man dies, a relation of his then marries a woman ‘to his name’ and the
resulting children of this union are regarded as the dead man’s children and bear
his name.
(Gittens, 1992, p. 69)

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Sociologists have tended to assume that the modern Western, largely white and
middle-class idea of the family is what is, if not actually the norm, then what should be
the norm, elsewhere as here. In this type of family there is assumed to be a gendered
division of labour such that the man takes on the major responsibility for earning a wage
and the woman for caring, even if she also works outside of the home. This view of the
family is one that is widely shared as an ideal. Hence, although other family forms such
as single-parent families, same-sex partnerships, extended families or re-formed
families are increasingly common not just in the UK but in many societies, they are not
necessarily seen as normal or desirable. Indeed, families in which no father is present
to exercise control are often seen, in Western societies at least, as the cause of social
problems such as crime, juvenile delinquency and welfare dependency in later life.

Sociological perspectives on the family

In sociology the family has traditionally been seen as a social institution formed on the
basis of kinship – a social bond based on blood, marriage or adoption that unites
individuals into close social groups and networks. More recently, sociologists such as
David Morgan (1999) have begun to argue that the family is best understood as a set
of practices (as opposed to an institution) so that rather than thinking of the family as
something we are ‘in’ it is more appropriately thought of as something that we ‘do’;
this reflects the view that our social experiences are shaped not just by social struc-
tures but also by agency – our capacity to act (see Chapter 1). Throughout the world,
families tend to form on the basis of marriage. Embedded within the English language
is evidence of an enduring cultural belief that (heterosexual) marriage is the most
appropriate context for procreation – indeed, as Macionis and Plummer (2002) note,
the word ‘matrimony’ in Latin means ‘the condition of motherhoood’. Traditionally
children born out of wedlock have been referred to as ‘illegitimate’. The cultural
association of the family with marriage and childbearing, at least in many Western
societies has begun to weaken (in reality if not in familial ideology), however, and an
increasingly diverse range of lived experiences of the family and procreation now
exist.
In Sweden, for instance, more than 20 per cent of adults live alone, and a large
proportion of adults (some 25 per cent) live together outside of marriage. Half of all
Swedish children (compared to about one in three in Europe as a whole) are born to
unmarried parents. Average household size in Sweden is the smallest in the world –
2.2 persons (Macionis and Plummer, 2002). Yet even in Sweden (which also has the
highest number of women in the labour force –77 per cent, as opposed to 59 per cent
in Europe generally) – as a glance through the idealised images of family life in the IKEA
catalogue (supposedly now read by more people the world over than the Bible)
suggests – the family remains central to Swedish society, albeit in a more diverse range
of forms than in previous generations, or in more conservative societies. Let us look
now at what sense sociologists have made of the family as a social institution.

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Functionalist perspectives

Sociologists have claimed that the family is a central and necessary institution in
society. Structural-functionalist sociologists, largely following the work of Talcott
Parsons, have argued that the family performs a variety of functions. Parsons and
Bales (1955), for instance, argued that the family:

1 Is the primary agent of socialisation – ideally, parents teach their children to be well-
integrated and contributing members of society although, of course, socialisation
continues throughout the life course.
2 Regulates sexual activity – in the interests of maintaining kinship patterns and property
rights. Hence, one relatively universal sexual norm is the ‘incest taboo’, although
precisely which kin fall within its boundaries varies.
3 Maintains social placement – some aspects of identity are pronounced at birth – sex,
race, and so on – others are prescribed – gender, ethnicity, religion – and are learned
and acquired largely through the family (see 1, above). The family therefore
maintains social position, inheritance rights and social transmission.
4 Provides material and emotional security – the family, for many, is a key site of physical
protection, emotional support and financial assistance, as signified by many English
language sayings such as ‘home is where the heart is’, or the belief that the family
is ‘a heaven in a heartless world’, that ‘blood is thicker than water’, and so on.

Functionalist perspectives have tended to assume that the co-resident nuclear family,
with a gendered division of labour, is the one most suited to the needs of industrial
society. In doing so, they have tended to assume that within this context, familial
relations are relatively consensual and harmonious. For Parsons and Bales (1955) the
family is the ‘backbone of society’ – an institution that serves the interests of society
as a whole.

Conflict perspectives

More critical (conflict) theories have drawn attention to the ways in which inequalities
are perpetuated within, and because of, the family. Marxists have challenged the
‘rosy’ picture painted by functionalist sociologists to the extent that they have sug-
gested that the family meets the needs not of society as a whole but specifically of
capitalism, and so serves the interests primarily of the ruling class. Marxists have
emphasised that the nuclear family serves the interests of capitalism by reproducing
the workforce and also by consuming the goods and services produced by capitalist
economies (see Chapter 2).
However, both approaches have tended to take the domestic division of labour
for granted. This is largely because both Marxist and functionalist theories of the family
have tended to look at the relationships between the family and society and have not
examined relationships within the family, nor have they considered how these internal
relationships both structure and are structured by external social, economic and power
relations shaped by sexual difference (the difference between men and women as

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social subjects – see Chapter 2). Hence, the domestic sphere has tended (until relatively
recently) to be regarded as a largely private arena – not only outside of public concern,
but also beyond (or beneath) the concerns of sociologists. Feminist sociologists, by
contrast, have highlighted the position of women in families and argued that the family
is one of the main ways in which women are oppressed.

The symmetrical family

One of the most influential sociological studies of the family was undertaken in Britain
by Willmott and Young in the 1960s (Young and Willmott, 1973), building on previous
studies they had carried out in London into families in the 1950s (Willmott and Young,
1957). Their research was undertaken in a period when rehousing policies and
increased affluence meant that most young people, when they married, could set up
home independently, and more geographical mobility meant they often did so at some
distance from their kin. It was argued, partly as a consequence of this and partly
because more married women (including those with children) were undertaking paid
employment, that the division of labour between men and women in the domestic
sphere was changing; Willmott and Young predicted that men would take on more
domestic work and women would be more likely to work outside the home. They
argued that the family would become more democratic, with both partners sharing
decision-making and financial resources. It was suggested that rather than having
segregated conjugal roles, where husbands and wives did different jobs within the
house and had separate activities and friends, husbands and wives were increasingly
spending their spare time together and had friends in common. The main conclusion
of the Willmott and Young studies was that the British family was becoming increas-
ingly symmetrical – that is, the roles of husbands and wives were becoming more alike
and would eventually become identical. Willmott and Young were careful to argue that
this was the emergent family form – the way that the family was developing, not the way
that it was already – but argued that in Britain there was a definite progression in this
direction.

Feminist approaches to the family

Feminists have challenged the view that the family is becoming more egalitarian and
symmetrical arguing, by contrast, that the family is a site of inequality in which women
are subordinated. Feminists have argued that this is largely because of women’s
position as wives and mothers, and because socialisation processes in the family,
during which children internalise patriarchal ideas and transmit them to their own
children, perpetuate male domination and female subordination.
Feminists argue that women’s position in the family as wife/mother results in
a position of subordination to men/fathers, at least in part because of economic
dependency, but also because of widely shared ideologies of the family. While Marxist
feminists stress that women’s exploitation in the family serves the interests of
capitalism, radical feminists stress that it serves the interests of men, who benefit from

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the unpaid labour of women in a system of patriarchy. They are agreed, however, that
the family oppresses women and that women are exploited and subordinated within
it. Thus feminists have questioned not only sociological assumptions concerning the
family, but common-sense ones as well. Sociologists Christine Delphy and Diana
Leonard (1992) have argued that the family is an economic system in which men
benefit from the work of women (and in many countries and cultures, the work of
children too). Family members effectively work for the (male) head of household they
argue, and so men benefit both from women’s work in the labour market and their
(unpaid) work in the home.
Barrie Thorne (1982) has argued that four themes are central to the feminist
challenge to the conventional sociology of the family:

1 Assumptions concerning the structure and functioning of the family. Feminists challenge
an ideology that sees the co-resident nuclear family with a gendered division of
labour as the only natural and legitimate form. Feminists argue against the view that
any specific family form is natural – that is, based on biological imperatives.
2 Feminists have sought to claim the family as an area for analysis; a move which
challenges the gender-based categories of analysis in malestream sociology (see
Chapter 1).
3 Feminists argue that different members of families experience family life in different ways.
They argue that women’s experiences of motherhood and family life have
demonstrated that families embody power relationships that can and do result in
conflict, violence and the inequitable distribution of work and resources.
4 Feminists question the assumption that the family should be thought of as a private sphere.
While women and children (particularly in very traditional societies) are often cut
off from outside contact on religious or cultural grounds, feminists argue that the
form the family takes in most societies is heavily influenced by economic and social
policies and the family is (and should be) permeable to outside intervention.

It is argued that common-sense beliefs about the nature of the family deny women the
opportunity to participate in wider society and gain equality with men. It is in this way,
also, that we can explain women’s exclusion from the labour market or their relative
disadvantage within it, as well as their relative marginalisation in youth cultures,
political life and other areas of social life discussed elsewhere in this book.

Industrialisation and the origins of the family wage

Feminists have examined the history of family life and changes in the way in which
the family is organised, particularly in industrialised societies. There is some disagree-
ment amongst feminists as to whether or not women have always been subordinated
and exploited in the family, or whether their subordination is a result of the growth and
development of capitalism. Radical feminists argue that patriarchy (the domination of
women by men) in the patriarchal mode of production (the family) existed long before
the development of capitalism. Marxist feminists argue that the economic dependency
of women on men, which enables them to be dominated and exploited in the family,

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is a result of the growth of industrial capitalism. Dual-systems feminists suggest that

the ideology of patriarchy predates capitalism but that the way in which women are
exploited and subordinated in industrialised societies is a result of the interaction of
this ideology with the material relations of production (the way in which goods and
services are produced and the relationship between the workers and the owners of the
means of production) in capitalist society. Feminist critical theorists have highlighted
the ways in which women’s role in the family problematises the Marxist category of
‘production’ emphasising the work involved in reproduction. Most recently, Black and
post-colonial feminists have criticised Western feminism for its ethnocentric analysis
of women’s experience of the family.
For women in industrialised societies the greatest change that has occurred in the
family since the seventeenth century has been the institutionalisation of the ‘house-
wife and mother’ role. As Engels (1972) argued in his book The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State (originally published in 1884), before industrialisation the
product of labour was regarded as the joint property of the family, and not seen as
the property of individuals to be divided up. Every member of the family worked to
produce what the family needed – there was no distinction between production and
consumption. With industrialisation the home became separated from the place of
work – consumption from production. Gradually women became associated with the
domestic sphere, the care of the home and children, and men with the public sphere,
earning a wage and participating in politics. These changes were gradual and affected
different classes at different times.
Most middle-class women in Britain accepted the housewife role by the beginning
of the nineteenth century, and the number of working-class women in officially recog-
nised paid employment (as recorded by the Census) declined rapidly after 1850.
Roberts’s (1982) research demonstrates that by 1900 the majority of working-class
women thought that ideally a wife should stay at home to care for her husband and
children, although there were regional variations.
The changes brought about by the industrial revolution altered not so much the
type of work that women did as the context in which that work was carried out. Women
became economically dependent on the wages of their husbands and no longer
had direct control over economic resources. The legal subordination of women
to men continued; women had limited rights in property, and the ability of women to
participate in public life was relatively restricted. Until 1884 a married woman had no
right to her own property in Britain – this passed from her father to her husband – nor
did she have any right to custody of or access to her children. It was not until the
passage of the Marital Causes Act of 1928 that women could divorce their husbands
on the same grounds as their husbands could divorce them, and not until 1882 that
an Act was passed instituting maintenance for women from the husband in case of legal
separation, and even then only on the grounds that he had committed aggravated
assault on her.
The industrial revolution resulted in the growth of towns and cities, in a vast
increase in population (particularly in urban areas), in the development of new and
better modes of transport (roads, canals and railways), and in new class relationships
shaped by the emergence of a working class (factory workers), a middle class (clerks,
administrators and professionals) and an upper class (the owners of factories and

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productive land). Changes in the relationships between men and women, husbands and
wives, parents and children took place in the context of these developments as well
as newly established social, economic and political structures.
In the pre-industrial period middle-class women helped their men in productive
roles. A notable example in Britain was the Birmingham-based Cadbury family. Before
the nineteenth century they all lived above the chocolate shop and the wives and
daughters were actually involved in the running of the business. However, when with
the growth of the town the Cadburys moved to the suburb, the men went to work at
the shop and the women stayed at home. Mrs Cadbury and her daughters undertook
domestic tasks and the supervision of domestic servants, and the daughters were
instructed in feminine graces. The women particularly became involved in religious
and philanthropic activities. The Cadburys wanted to have a different kind of home
life. With increased affluence they no longer needed the labour of the female members
of the family and could afford to bring in labour. They also valued the newly emerging
domestic ideal – the home as a retreat from work and a view of women as delicate
and needing protection from the world of work as a place of danger and sin. The
Cadburys did not have to move from the shop, but for other middle-class families
new methods of production meant that the factory was separated from the home, and
the home, the domestic sphere, came to be seen as the rightful (ideal) place for a
woman.
For the working classes the changes were very different. In pre-industrial Britain
the family had been a unit of production. There had been a division of labour by gender,
and men were generally seen as having a dominant role, but women were not regarded
as the economic dependents of men. In the early stages of industrialisation, men,
women and children all worked together in the factories. Men generally managed to
secure for themselves the jobs that were seen as the most skilled and, hence, the most
highly paid. Gradually during the course of the nineteenth century women and children
were excluded from factory jobs and became increasingly dependent on men
economically. The working class came to share the domestic ideals of the middle class
and to see a non-working wife as the ideal – a wife who could care properly for her
husband and children and provide a home for them. The reasons why this happened
are complex, and feminists do not agree on them precisely, but two factors do emerge
as very important:

1 Middle-class philanthropists attempted to shape working-class life to fit their ideas of what
family life was like, and put pressure on government to implement reforms that
reinforced these conceptions. The 1834 Poor Law assumed that a woman was
dependent on a man, for instance. ‘Protective’ factory legislation restricted the
hours women and children could work, lessening their worth as employees. Women
were assumed to be responsible for caring for their husbands and children, and
middle-class women set out to teach working-class women how to do this, as well
as to ‘protect’ them from the labour market.
2 From the mid-nineteenth century sections of the male working class (through the
trade union movement) began to argue that a man should be paid sufficient to support
a wife and children, so excluding the necessity of his wife or children taking paid
employment. Most feminists argue that the ‘family wage’ principle reinforced the

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exclusion of women from paid employment and their economic dependence on

men, thus giving men power over their wives. Hence, women perform domestic and
other duties in exchange for being maintained by their husbands.

Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh (1980) argue that women were disadvantaged
by the growing idea that a man should earn a family wage, and that both capitalists
and the organised male working class benefited. Capitalists benefited because women
at home caring for their husbands and children helped to reproduce and maintain a fit
and active workforce, and working-class men gained the unpaid services of their wives.
It also enabled men to have economic and social power in the home. They argue that
this ideology of the family wage is still powerful and is a major aspect of inequality for
women – not only because married men are supposed to support wives and children,
but because men are thought to be entitled to earn a ‘family wage’ while women are
not. This justifies the low pay that attaches to ‘women’s work’ (see Chapter 9), restricts
women’s choices and reduces their economic status within marriage.
In the former Communist societies of Central and Eastern Europe, industrialisation
also resulted in the exclusion of women from paid employment (Voronina, 1994).
However, Communist governments introduced equal rights legislation, and the
majority of women came to have full-time employment. Being engaged in full-time
employment, however, did not liberate women from domestic work (Khotkina, 1994),
and indeed the hours of domestic labour put in by women in Communist societies
probably exceeded those of their sisters in Western Europe (Einhorn, 1993). Zoya
Khotkina (1994) has suggested that while there was equality according to the con-
stitution, there was patriarchy in real, everyday life. Women were (and are) not only
expected to carry out the majority of domestic labour but are also restricted in their
work opportunities (Voronina, 1994).

Diversity in family forms and practices

While the ‘ideal family’ form (consisting of an economically dependent caring female,
children, and an economically active male) may be the moral or ideological norm in
a range of societies, in reality there is a wide variety of living arrangements and kinship
systems throughout the world (Therborn, 2004). Even within contemporary Britain
there is a considerable diversity of family forms and ways of organising roles within
the family. Sociologist Judith Stacey has argued that what we mean by ‘the family’
now refers to such a broad range of experiences that it makes sense to talk about a
‘postmodern family condition’:

The postmodern family condition is not a new model of family life equivalent
to that of the modern family; it is not the next stage in an orderly progression of
stages in family history; rather the postmodern family condition signals the
moment in history when our belief in a logical progression of stages has broken
down. . . . The postmodern family condition incorporates both experimental and
nostalgic dimensions as it lurches forward and backward into an uncertain future.
(Stacey, 1996, p. 8)

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However we conceptualise or explain it, as research in the UK and elsewhere

suggests, more and more households do not conform to conventional norms or to the
‘ideal’ nuclear family at the centre of familial ideology. Changes in household size and
composition, in marriage and cohabitation, in divorce, in parenting and in working
patterns all suggest the existence of an increasingly diverse range of family forms, in
Western societies at least.

Household size and composition

Substantial changes have taken place in recent years in the size and composition of
households and families in many societies. The size of households has decreased
substantially since the 1970s, largely due to falling fertility rates, increasing divorce
rates, patterns of migration, increased life expectancy (with many elderly people
– especially women, see Chapter 5 – living alone), and changes in family forms such
as an increasing proportion of single-person households, cohabiting couples and lone-
parent families. According to the 2002 General Household Survey Living in Britain,
30 per cent of UK households (6.5 million) consist of only one person – up from 26 per
cent in 1991. Nearly half of these (3.1 million) are one-pensioner only households,
three-quarters of which are occupied by a woman living alone. Single-person house-
holds (particularly those consisting of women) are least likely to have amenities such
as central heating or sole use of a bath/shower and toilet. More than one in eight single
person households do not have central heating (www.statistics.gov.uk). This means
that, largely due to the cumulative effect of disadvantage throughout the life course
(see Chapter 5), elderly women particularly living in single-person households are at
risk from poverty and social deprivation.

Cohabitation and marriage

Marriage, as Therborn (2004, p. 131) puts it, ‘is a socio-sexual institution, a part of
the wider institutional complex of the family’ so much so that there is what he calls a
‘rule of universal marriage’ in most human societies. As he goes on to note, however,
‘marriage has often been a messy business’. Since the 1960s, ‘we have been witnessing
a dramatic change in the landscape of human coupling’ such that it has become what
he describes as ‘a variegated phenomenon within and between Western societies’
(p. 193). More couples are cohabiting (living together without formal marriage) than
ever before in Western societies, and cohabitation has become a normal prelude to
marriage for almost all young people, as well as an alternative to it for many (Therborn,
2004). Cohabitation has increased dramatically over the past twenty years or so in
Britain and elsewhere (Table 6.1). As with marriage, women tend to cohabit at a
younger age than men (women aged between 16 and 24 are twice as likely as men to
cohabit), while men over 25 are more likely than women of the same age to cohabit.
In some respects marriage is more popular than ever, however, and contrary to
what many may believe, in Western Europe about as many people are married today
as a hundred years ago (Table 6.2). This means, therefore, that the majority of adult

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Table 6.1 Cohabitation by sex and relationship type, UK, 2002 (%)

Single Widowed Divorced Separated

Men
Cohabiting 22 18 34 22
Not cohabiting 78 82 66 78
All men 100 100 100 100

Women
Cohabiting 29 8 30 12
Not cohabiting 71 92 70 88
All women 100 100 100 100

(source: www.statistics.gov.uk)

Table 6.2 Western European women never married by the

age of 45–49, c.1900 and 2000 (% of age group)

1900 2000

Austria 13 17
Belgium 17 12
Denmark 13 16
Finland 15 18
France 12 14
Germany 10 13
Ireland 17 13
Italy 11 6
Netherlands 14 12
Norway 18 14
Portugal 20 4
Spain 10 13
Sweden 19 27
Switzerland 17 20
UK 17 8
Unweighted average 15 14

Source: Therborn, 2004, p. 182.

women in most European societies are married (Table 6.3). There are both gender and
class differences in marital age, with working-class couples marrying on average at a
younger age than middle-class ones. In 2002, the average age for a woman to marry
for the first time was 28, and for a man 30. People are also increasingly marrying more
than once, and the percentage of remarriage has risen as the divorce rate has increased
– in 2002, 18 per cent of all marriages in the UK were remarriages for both parties
(www.statistics.gov.uk).
Remarriage often creates what Macionis and Plummer (2002, p. 451) call ‘blended
families’ composed of children and some combination of biological parents and
step-parents (who may become adoptive parents). In the UK, however, the majority
of stepfamilies consist of a couple with one or more children from the previous

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Table 6.3 Family status of women in the EU, 1996 (% of all women aged 16 and older)

Single Married Cohabiting Divorced Widowed

Austria 23 48 4 10 16
Belgium 18 61 6 7 9
Denmark 22 43 17 7 12
Finland 21 42 10 13 14
France 22 43 12 11 13
E. Germany 16 62 4 7 11
W. Germany 19 55 2 8 17
Greece 19 65 0 2 14
Ireland 32 51 3 2 13
Italy 37 49 2 2 10
Netherlands 22 54 7 8 9
Portugal 24 59 1 4 13
Spain 28 57 2 2 12
Sweden 27 41 15 7 10
UK 23 54 4 8 12
Average 24 52 5 6 13

Source: Therborn, 2004, p. 203.

relationship of the woman only. This reflects the tendency for many children to stay
with their mother following divorce. In less than one in ten stepfamilies in the UK, the
children are from the father’s previous relationship (www.nso.gov.uk).

Divorce

The number of divorces in the UK nearly trebled between 1961 and 1971, doubled
between 1971 and 1981 but increased by only 11 per cent between 1981 and 1991
(www.nso.gov.uk). The rise in the divorce rate correlates with legal changes that have
extended the grounds for divorce and made it easier to obtain one. The majority of
divorced people subsequently remarry or cohabit.
The most common reason in the UK for a woman to be granted a divorce is the
‘unreasonable behaviour’ of her husband, whereas for a man it is on grounds of ‘two
years separation with consent’ (www.nso.gov.uk). Most divorces in Britain are granted
to women (70 per cent in 2002). Various explanations have been put forward for the
relatively high divorce rates in societies such as the UK. Divorce is legally easier to
accomplish than was the case for previous generations. Demographic changes mean
that in the past the early death of a spouse probably ended as many marriages after
a few years as divorce does now (Macionis and Plummer, 2002). Ideologies of indi-
vidualism are increasing and so more men and women expect choice, control and
equality over their lives (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). Ideologies of romantic
love mean that partners are more likely than in the past to dissolve one relationship
in favour of another when sexual passion subsides. Many contemporary marriages
are stressful, particularly given the increasing likelihood that even in families with
young children both men and women are likely to work outside of the home. Divorce

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is more socially acceptable (and no longer carries the negative social stigma that it did,
say, a century ago, particularly in more secular societies), and some women are now
(relatively) less financially dependent on men.
However, because mothers usually gain custody of children following divorce,
but fathers typically earn more income, the well-being of children often depends on
fathers making court-ordered child-support payments – so a woman who has divorced
her husband on grounds of his ‘unreasonable behaviour’ is likely to remain financially
dependent on him, particularly if she has children, and it could be argued that this
is another example of the way in which the ideological concept of the ‘family wage’
serves to disadvantage women.

Birth outside of marriage

More people are having children without being married in most Western societies
including the UK. Whereas only 6 per cent of all live births in 1961 were outside of
marriage, by 1991 32 per cent of live births were outside marriage. By 2001, 40 per
cent of all births in the UK were outside of marriage, although 64 per cent of these births
were registered jointly by parents living at the same address.

Lone parents

As Table 6.4 illustrates, the number of women who are lone parents has also increased
substantially in recent years. In fact, the number of households headed by a female lone
parent in the UK has more than trebled in the last three decades. Lone-parent families
(originating from separation and divorce, from birth outside of marriage, and in very
small proportions from widowhood), have become increasingly common across many
Western countries. As we noted above in the case of divorce, women in most countries

Table 6.4 Family type and marital status of lone mothers, UK, 1971–2001 (%)

Family type 1971 1981 1991 2001

Married/cohabiting 92 87 81 75

Lone mother 7 11 18 22
Single 1 2 6 10
Widowed 2 2 1 1
Divorced 2 4 6 7
Separated 2 2 4 4

Lone father 1 2 1 3

All lone parents 8 13 19 25

All 100 100 100 100

Source: http://www.statistics.gov.uk

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are more likely than men to be given custody of their children. Because of the relative
disadvantage faced by women when they become the sole supporter of a family (as a
result of various factors including the impact of the family wage, as well as their limited
access to resources such as childcare and employment opportunities), large numbers
of women and their children are vulnerable to poverty. UNICEF argues that this is
particularly the case for women who experience motherhood at a relatively young
age – in European countries less than 4 per cent of all live births are to women under
20, in other parts of the world this figure is much higher. In Central and Eastern
European countries such as Moldova and the Ukraine, for instance, teen births are
about 18 per cent of the total (www.unece.org).

Working mothers

In the UK, working-age women with dependent children are less likely than those
without to be economically active: 68 per cent in the UK, compared with 76 per cent.
The age of the youngest child affects the economic activity of mothers; 55 per cent of
working-age women with children under 5 are in the labour force. Conversely, men
with dependent children are more likely than those without to be in the labour force.
The age of their children has no impact – around 93 per cent of men with dependent
children are in the labour force regardless of the age of their youngest child. Women
are more likely than men to work part-time (www.nso.gov.uk), particularly if they have
dependent children. Nearly 40 per cent of women with dependent children work
part-time compared with 23 per cent of those without. Only 4 per cent of men with
dependent children and 9 per cent of men without work part-time.
Women, regardless of their working status, tend to spend more time caring for
their children than men. In 2003, women living in a couple and working full-time spent
on average nearly four and a half hours on childcare and other activities with their
children on a weekday (the figure for men was three and a half hours). Both men and
women working full time spent just over six and a half hours a day with their children
at weekends, suggesting a greater degree of equality in parenting than previously.
Nevertheless, men and women tend to spend time with children in different ways.
Women spend around two hours a day at weekends on housework while with their
children, compared to one hour and twenty minutes spent by men. In contrast, men
spend around one hour and twenty minutes watching TV in the company of their
children, compared with around fifty minutes by women (Labour Force Survey, Spring
2003, cited in EOC, 2004).
Many people have argued that the trends cited here are evidence of the break-
down of the family. However, these contemporary patterns tend to be of a form that
mirrors the conventional nuclear family, including its sexual fidelity (Therborn, 2004).
A large proportion of children may now be born outside marriage, but the majority
of parents who have children outside of marriage do tend to marry subsequently.
Traditional roles of motherhood tend to have remained relatively constant, and indeed
children born to single women are now more likely to be brought up by their biological
mothers than to be given up for adoption as in the past. The result of increasing divorce
and increasing birth outside marriage, however, is that more children grow up for at

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least part of their childhood in lone-parent families, and these are almost invariably
headed by women.
Equality, choice and diversity have become key features of many contemporary
family forms – gay and lesbian registered partnerships are now formally recognised
and socially accepted in many Western societies, for instance – but so too has the
risk of poverty and deprivation, particularly in single-parent households headed by
women. Such diversity has considerably challenged the idea that there is one ‘ideal’
family form. Some sociologists have argued that even if we wanted this to be the case,
the world has become too complex for this to be possible. As Beck and Beck-
Gernsheim argue in The Normal Chaos of Love, society has become focused very much
on the individual and his/her lifestyle choices so that

it is no longer possible to pronounce in some binding way what family, marriage,

parenthood, sexuality or love mean, what they should be or could be; rather they
vary in substance, expectations, norms and morality from individual to individual
and from relationship to relationship.
(Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995, p. 5)

Familial ideology

Despite (or perhaps because of) such diversity in family forms and dramatic changes
in the ways in which the family is configured, particularly in contemporary Western
societies, however, what sociologists call ‘familial ideology’ – dominant ideas about
how roles and responsibilities within families should be organised – persists. Veronica
Beechey suggested that two assumptions underlie familial ideology. These are
that:

the co-resident nuclear family . . . is normatively desirable, [and that] . . . the form
of sexual division of labour in which the woman is the housewife and mother and
primarily located within the private world of the family, and the man is wage-
earner and bread-winner and primarily located in the ‘public’ world of paid work,
is also normatively desirable.
(Beechey, 1986, p. 99)

She suggests that familial ideology rests on the assumption that the family is
biologically determined and that particular family forms are somehow ‘natural’. The
patriarchal family form is therefore reproduced by social and legal institutions in
Western societies because it is assumed that this is both how people do live their lives
and how they should live their lives. For example, these assumptions about families
underlie patterns of schooling, labour markets and ways in which the social security
system is organised, as well as the type of housing that tends to be provided in both
the private and the public sector. Their force is three-fold:

1 to set up the role of housewife and mother as a normal and natural lifestyle for
women;

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2 to declare it a lifestyle that is inherently satisfying for women and one with which
they ought to be satisfied;
3 to place on women as individuals any blame for the lifestyle’s failure to satisfy them.

In other words, like any ideology the familial ideology has the effect of converting the
interests of a dominant group into the self-perceived interests of a subordinated one
and making the dominated group responsible for any consequent failures – in this case
by individualising a set of discontents which might otherwise be thought to have their
base in collectively organised structural pressures rather than in individual failures.
The association of female single parents with juvenile delinquency, a decline in the
work ethic, welfare dependency and the emergence of an ‘underclass’ are examples
of this.
Boys and girls, men and women take it for granted that men are strong and tough
and should be ‘breadwinners’ and that women are submissive and gentle and should
care for men and children. Even when men and women’s own experiences do not
live up to this ideal they still tend to see it as how things ought to be. It is also assumed
that this type of family best serves the interests of its individual members and of society
generally. Feminists question the assumption that a particular set of living arrange-
ments is natural and universal and that this way of life necessarily best serves the
interests of women and society as a whole; they highlight instead various aspects
of gendered experiences of family life that serve to oppress and exploit women, argu-
ing variously that this oppression is in the interests of men, of capitalism, or of both.
In particular, feminists have considered themes such as gendered power relations and
economic inequalities within the family, violence within families, the domestic division
of labour, and men and women’s different experiences of parenting.

Gendered experiences of family life

To understand the feminist critique of the family it is necessary to examine the dis-
juncture between ideologies of domesticity and women’s lived experiences as wives
and mothers. Betty Friedan (1963) referred to the pressures experienced by middle-
class American mothers in the 1960s as ‘the problem that has no name’, while Liz
Stanley and Sue Wise (1983) have argued that many women distinguish between the
family as an ‘institution’ and their own family. The former is seen as desirable, while
the latter is often experienced as problematic.
Many girls grow up expecting and wanting to get married, seeing their wedding
day as the most important of their lives; the mass media and popular culture clearly
plays an important role in perpetuating ideals of ‘dream weddings’ and ‘marital bliss’.
The reality is often very different from the dream, however – particularly for those
women who become subject to domestic abuse and violence. Jessie Bernard (1973)
suggested that in heterosexual couplings there is ‘her’ marriage and ‘his’ marriage, two
different realities, and that men tend to benefit more from marriage than women
do. Married women are more likely than single women or than single men to suffer
from mental illness, while married men are the least likely to do so. Single women are
often thought to be in need of the protection of a man. Media culture often perpetuates

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the idea that there is something ‘wrong’ with an unmarried adult woman, and this is
an additional pressure towards marriage. Men, on the other hand, gain both economic
and social advantages from marriage – they are cared for, they enjoy the ‘unpaid’
domestic labour of their wives, and often ‘unpaid’ help with their employed role as
well, or in family businesses. Many women ‘help’ their employed husbands by enter-
taining colleagues and clients, by doing unpaid clerical work (by acting as a telephone
answering service, for instance), and in some cases a wife is seen as essential or nearly
essential for a man to be able to carry out his work role (Finch, 1983). Most wives are
expected to organise their lives around the demands of their husbands’ jobs – preparing
meals and other activities to fit in with their partners’ working hours – and to tailor what
they do to his ‘needs’.
Domestic labour is estimated to be worth quite a lot if it had to be paid for
at market rates. In 1987 the Legal and General Life Assurance Company estimated
that a ‘dependent’ wife was worth £19,253 a year in earnings (quoted in The Sunday
Times, 29 March 1987). The Company located on a computer the ‘average’ wife, a 37-
year-old mother of two named Rosalind Harris. Her work was found to start at 7 a.m.
on Monday when she began to prepare the breakfast and to end at 9 p.m. that day
(a 14-hour working day). During the week she worked as a shopper, a window-
cleaner, a nurse, a driver, a cleaner, a cook and a childminder. Her total working
week was of 92 hours’ duration. (This excludes periods ‘on call’, when the children
were in bed.)
Feminists have suggested a number of reasons why the reality of married life
might be different from the rhetoric. Ann Oakley (1982) has suggested that women
experience four areas of conflict in family life:

1 The sexual division of labour means that women are expected to be responsible for
domestic work and childcare. This means that women become economically
dependent on men and have no (or limited) access to money that they see as their
own.
2 Conflict arises over the different emotional needs of men and women. Women are
expected to deal with the frustrations and anger of husbands and children but often
have no one to whom they can turn themselves (research suggests that women
undertake a large amount of ‘emotion work’ within the family).
3 Economic and physical differences in power between husbands and wives mean that
women can experience lack of control over financial resources, an inability to
engage in social activities and even physical violence from their husbands.
4 Male control of sexuality and fertility means that men’s needs are assumed to be the
more important. Women are expected to ‘please’ their husbands, to give in to their
sexual demands, and to have and to care for their children.

Indeed, it could be argued that married women do not have a separate identity either
in their own eyes or the eyes of others. Married women generally put the needs of their
families before their own, and they are often identified primarily with their husbands
or children. In Britain, married women generally take their husband’s name and often
become seen as an appendage of their husbands or children, being ‘John Smith’s wife’
and ‘Jean and Billy Smith’s mother’ – having no separate social identity of their own.

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This identification with the family often carries over into paid employment (see Chapter
9). Men, on the other hand, tend to take their main identity from their employment.
Wives are frequently asked what their husbands do for a living, as if that were a major
source of their identity, and seldom what they do themselves.
Ideas about women’s role are reinforced by media culture, which constructs
and represents women in a relatively narrow range of roles, often with an emphasis
on that of wife and mother. This is especially noticeable in advertising and popular soap
operas (see Chapter 12). What is equally important is the range of roles that women
are not portrayed in, or which are seen as exceptional for women. Even in television
programmes such as The X Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer the ‘tough’ women not
only have male bosses or leaders but are frequently portrayed in domestic and caring
roles as well. Similarly, children’s books and reading schemes have often been shown
to portray men and women, boys and girls in typically segregated masculine and
feminine roles (see Chapter 4).

Power relations and money

The choices about who works in the family and who stays at home to care for children
and the household are based on an ideology of appropriate gender roles (see Chapter
1). However, this is reinforced by labour market factors; men can generally earn more
than women, so that it is often the case that men have the paid employment and
women care for the children. This traps women in a situation of financial dependency.
Employment, taken to fit in with domestic responsibilities, rarely pays sufficient to give
a woman financial independence, and most women do not feel they are entitled to
control the spending of the ‘family wage’. Even where it is the norm for married women
to have full-time paid employment, the horizontal and vertical segregation of the labour
market (see Chapter 9) means that wives generally earn considerably less than their
husbands.
The family wage is supposed to be large enough to support a man, his wife and
his children. A man’s need to earn a family wage is used in wage bargaining by trade
unions, and a wife’s earnings are often seen as supplementary – money with which to
buy luxuries. Hunt (1980) found that the husband’s money was often spent on the
essentials and the wife’s on ‘extras’, so it was the man’s employment that was seen as
essential and the wife’s as something that could be given up if necessary. However,
not all married men with a family earn a ‘family wage’ – the number of families living
in poverty would undoubtedly increase if it were not for married women’s earnings –
and many men and some women without family responsibilities do earn one, and
considerably more.
It is important to keep in mind that the ‘family wage’ is not paid to the family as a
unit, but to the (male) wage earner. How this money is distributed within the family
depends on power relations between men and women, and on who is seen as having
the right to decide how and where the money is spent. This highlights the problems of
using the family as a unit of class analysis in malestream sociological research, and
of attributing a class position to women based on that of the male head of household
(see Chapter 3).

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Jan Pahl (1980) has described several different ways in which husbands and wives
manage their household income. In some cases the husband hands over the wage
packet and the wife gives him back his ‘pocket money’; in others the husband gives
the wife ‘housekeeping money’; in a third type of case resources are pooled and
spending decisions made jointly. Increasingly in dual-income households men and
women’s earnings are retained separately. Furthermore, research shows that resources
are not shared equally within families. Graham (1984) and Pahl (1983) found that
women with children whose marriages have broken down have sometimes found that
they are better off on state benefits than they were when they lived with their husbands.
Women tend to put their husbands and children first and their own needs last.
When money is tight, women are often the ones who tend to go without food, clothes
and other necessities. Women rarely have personal spending money in the way that
men do, and often feel that if they spend housekeeping money on themselves they
are depriving their children. It is generally men and children who have the primary use
of household goods such as computers. In households with one car it is usually men
who have the main use of it; even if the woman can drive it tends to be the man who
does, particularly on family journeys. In cases where the car or computer is a ‘perk’ of
the job, the wife may feel she has no direct claim over it in any case.
Many women may accept their relative lack of control because they are not the
main breadwinners. Obviously women’s lack of power over financial resources relates
not just to ideologies concerning appropriate roles for men and women but also to
the realities of who is seen as earning the money and who is seen to be ‘not working’.
Women’s domestic labour is not seen as ‘real’ work because it does not bring in money,
and women are not paid for it. Hence, in exchange for their domestic labour, husbands
effectively maintain married women. However, it is men’s control over financial
resources that (at least in part) gives them relative power in marriage and makes it
difficult for a wife to leave her husband even if he is mentally or physically violent to
her, or if she is just unhappy in her marriage. Again this is compounded by the kind
of job that she would be able to get if she left, and if she has children.
Women’s financial dependence within the family appears to be compounded by
factors such as arranged marriage and also by cultural beliefs about the role of women
in developing and post-colonial societies, particularly in Asian and African societies
where the norm is for a married woman to move in with her husband’s family.

Arranged marriage and patriarchal family forms

In many parts of the world, the principle and practice of arranged marriage has been
both widely challenged and defended on grounds of cultural diversity. As Goran
Therborn (2004) notes,

In a global perspective, one of the most powerful expressions of patriarchy . . . is

paternal and/or parental power over children’s marriage. A marriage is one of
life’s most important decisions, and therefore one where the difference between
autonomy and heteronomy weighs most heavily. All available evidence indicates
that the autonomy of marriage has increased during the twentieth century.

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Nevertheless, parents still have a major say regarding their children’s marriage,
in at least half, probably more, of the populations of Asia, in many parts of Africa,
in pockets of Europe – not only among recent immigrants – and also among Indian
peoples of the Americas. Parents also play a significant part in the marital life of
many adult children through post-marital household patterns.
(Therborn, 2004, p. 107)

For many women, this means that their relative freedom within marriage and the family
is limited. However, as Gerami and Lehnerer (2001) note in their research on the
family, numerous forms of resistance to what they describe as ‘patriarchal fundamen-
talism’ can be identified, not only in terms of organised collective efforts, but also
through individual women’s agency. Using a series of narrative interviews, they discuss
four strategies used by Iranian women to negotiate patriarchal family practices (such
as parental household living arrangements) and arranged marriages. The women in
their research exercised agency by responding to the various demands of the family
and the state through collaboration, acquiescence, co-optation and subversion. Their
narratives show how some women negotiated the economic hardship and gender
oppression brought on by the Iranian revolution, and how these negotiations affected
women’s role within the family when filtered through the cultural norms of Islamic
fundamentalism in ways that problematise the ‘victim’ narratives that often charac-
terise Western feminist discussions of fundamentalism, particularly in relation to
marriage, the family and the household. However, most women in their research
remained financially dependent on their own or their husband’s families, and some
reported being subject to violence and intimidation within the home (see also Saul,
2003).

Violence within families

While the ideal family may serve as a haven in a heartless world; the reality is that
for many women and children, and for some men as well, the family can be an
extremely dangerous and violent place. Research suggests that a woman is more likely
to be killed, injured or physically attacked in her own home, by someone she is related
to (either biologically or through marriage or cohabitation) than in any other social
context (Macionis and Plummer, 2002). Russian sociologist Galina Sillaste (2004)
reports that some 15,000 Russian women die annually as a result of violence within
the home. US government statistics report similarly that almost 30 per cent of women
who are murdered (as opposed to only 3 per cent of men), are killed by partners or
ex-partners.
Although most US states and European countries had passed marital rape
legislation by the mid-1990s, in 2001 only 30 countries worldwide recognised what
is increasingly referred to as ‘non-consensual sex within marriage’ (Macionis and
Plummer, 2002). In many countries, then, a man cannot be charged with raping his wife,
even if they are separated. As Therborn (2004) notes, in many parts of the world,
husbands still control not only all major family decisions but also whether their wives
may leave the house or not: ‘Nor have special gender sacrifice and institutionalized

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violence against girls and women disappeared. While violence against women has
become an issue in Africa and Asia, wife-beating is still legitimate in many social
milieux’ (p. 107). Also significant is the extent to which not only men but also women
internalise the belief that violence against women is acceptable. In a recent study in
Egypt, for instance, 90 per cent of women thought that beating a wife was justified if
she ‘answered back’, 70 per cent if she ‘refuses sex’, and 64 per cent when she ‘talks
to other men’. Of the married women questioned, over half had been beaten by their
husbands in the past year (Zanaty-el et al., 1996).
One of the most obvious questions to ask, particularly in relatively egalitarian,
Western societies, is ‘Why does a woman subject to violence within the home not just
leave?’ Feminist research suggests that most physically, emotionally and sexually
abused women – especially those with children – have few options, particularly
because of their relative financial dependence on men. Some women may blame
themselves for their partner’s violence; others, perhaps raised in violent families
themselves, may have learned to view violence as a normal part of family life (Leonard,
1982). Some sociologists have noted that, in addition to (and largely because of) their
role in providing an emotional safety valve for men and children, many women may
perform ‘emotion work’ on themselves and so convince themselves that their family
life is really a happy one; this means that they tend to ‘reproduce their own false
consciousness’ (Duncombe and Marsden, 1995, p. 150).
In the past, violence within the family tended to be regarded by the state as a
largely private matter, but now even without separation or divorce, a woman can
obtain court protection from a violent partner or relative. Anti-stalking legislation (such
as the 1997 Harassment Act in the UK) is now in place in many countries. Communities
across Europe and other parts of the world have established shelters and refuges for
women and children driven out of their homes by violence. The first women’s refuge
in the UK was set up in Chiswick, East London in 1972 by Erin Pizzey and today almost
every large town and city in Britain has a women’s refuge or shelter. On the one hand,
the spread of such refuges illustrates the persistence of violence within the home;
on the other hand, it is testimony to the extent to which feminist campaigners have
shifted social attitudes so that family violence is now seen very much as a social (as
opposed to an individual) problem. As radical feminists have long since argued, ‘the
personal is political’. Nevertheless, it remains the case that violence within the home
is closer to the reality of domestic life than the ‘cereal-packet’ ideal for many women
and children. It also remains the case that, although by far the majority of (reported)
domestic violence is perpetrated by men, patriarchal ideology often means that when
men do become the victims of abuse they are often not believed or even ridiculed. This
highlights a contentious point within feminism – the extent to which men can also
become subject to patriarchal ideology and oppression.

The domestic division of labour

To understand the division of labour within the family we need to examine not just who
does what, but who is seen as responsible for ensuring that a particular job is carried
out, and to challenge the common-sense assumption that there is an equitable division

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of labour between ‘man the breadwinner’ and ‘woman the carer’. We also need to
consider that what constitutes women’s ‘rights’ in this respect varies culturally. As
one young woman from the high-caste Rajputs in the conservative Indian state of
Uttar Pradesh describes:

I can talk to my husband even in the presence of others, but my mother could
not talk to her husband when we were very young children. . . . Although, so far,
I have never eaten in the presence of my husband, I can talk to my husband any
time I want. . . . My mother could not serve meals to her own husband [because
of pollution norms]. . . . Now I can serve my husband myself.
(cited in Minturn, 1993, p. 84)

For this woman, being able to serve her husband food was a measure of progress
in terms of gender equality, whereas women in the West have tended to argue that
‘serving’ husbands has been one of the primary causes of women’s relative dis-
advantage both within and outside of the family.
Imbalances in the domestic division of labour come about partly because women,
in Western societies at least, increasingly undertake paid employment as well as being
responsible for the home, and partly because (in these societies and elsewhere) doing
housework, cooking and caring for children often requires far more hours of work and
responsibility than paid labour does. Domestic labour is physically and emotionally
demanding work, but is rarely recognised as such (even by women themselves),
feminists have argued. Feminists often point out that it is women who are generally
responsible for the necessary, repetitive jobs that have to be done on a regular basis,
while men often do those that are creative and can be done when convenient. Often
this division is based on what men and women are thought to be naturally good at.
Women are often thought to be naturally good at cleaning, sewing, washing up,
shopping, washing, caring for children, cooking, and so on.
Ann Oakley (1974a, 1974b) was the first feminist sociologist to examine the
division of labour in the household sociologically, and to look at domestic labour as
work. She challenged the view that women have a private domain of their own – a
domain which they rule and where they make the decisions. In fact, she argued that
as men spend more time in the home, take more interest in their children and have
more joint activities with their wives, so women’s domestic power is diminished.
Writing in the 1970s, David Young and Peter Willmott (1973) suggested that men and
women in Britain now share childcare, domestic tasks, and the ‘breadwinner’ role
and make decisions jointly, but Ann Oakley (1982) has argued that even when conjugal
roles are shared, men are generally said to be ‘helping’ their wives. Women are often
held responsible if essential tasks are not carried out, and men will often ‘make do’ for
meals if their wives are absent, or wives feel obliged to make provision in their absence.
This means that women tend to assume what Doucet (2001) has described as the
‘emotional responsibility’ for domestic labour. Stephen Edgell (1980) argued that wives
are often left to make the more minor decisions, about meals or purchasing children’s
clothes, while the major decisions such as moving house tend to be made more by
men. However, even in the more minor areas of decision-making a husband’s wishes
may be paramount. Pauline Hunt (1980) has suggested that women usually prepare

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meals that are the ones their husbands or children like and often discount their own
preferences. Research in a number of other countries suggests a very similar picture
(see e.g. Einhorn, 1993; Voronina, 1994; Khotkina, 1994).
Even when they have paid employment women continue to do most of the
domestic work – to take on what feminist sociologists have called ‘the dual role’. In
recent years, feminists have recognised that many women actually undertake a ‘triple
shift’ – not only working outside of the home, as well as taking responsibility for the
performance of domestic labour, but also providing care and assistance to elderly or
dependent family members as well. In the UK, by far the majority of those people
providing (unpaid) care or assistance to another person are women (see Chapter 7).
While it is evident that men are not sharing domestic (or caring) work equally
with their wives or partners, even if their wives or partners are in full-time employment,
it is even more clear that they are not taking on shared responsibility for tasks. The jobs
men seem to do more often than women – ‘do-it-yourself’, for example – are those that
tend to have a lasting, tangible output, while women are often responsible for the
day-to-day repetitive, never-ending jobs. This division of labour is often considered to
be ‘natural’ by both men and women. It is also apparent that the amount of time women
spend performing domestic labour and other household tasks has not declined
substantially, even with the introduction and increasing ownership of consumer
durables such as so-called ‘labour saving devices’. Sociologists Ruth Madigan and
Moira Munro (1996) have argued, for instance, that the term ‘home’ carries a heavy
ideological weight that permeates domestic consumption and labour. As they put it,
‘questions of style, design and tastefulness evidently cause anxiety, but they are largely
subsumed by familial values (a relaxed, comfortable haven) and also by the desire
to maintain “respectability” through maintaining high house-keeping standards’
(p. 41). This latter point also applies particularly to caring for children.

Parenting

Many feminists argue that having children perpetuates women’s subordination and
exploitation. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (1988 [1949]) argued that mother-
hood was one of the mainstays of women’s subordination. It is this more than any
other role that is seen as the basis upon which men subordinate women, with women
thereby placed under the control and protection of men. Ideologies of parenting are
clearly gendered – think of the different cultural connotations of the phrases ‘she
mothered him’ and ‘he fathered a child’. (In English at least) the former suggests a role
that involves nurturing and nourishing, the latter purely a reproductive (biological) act.
The idealisation of motherhood means than men are often excluded from the care
of newborn and very young children – even when they might want to be involved. In
an attempt to counter this, Scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Norway have
introduced one-month paternity leave and a range of policy initiatives designed to
encourage men to play a more active role in childcare.
Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (1974) has argued that women will be
able to free themselves from men’s control only when they are freed from the burden
of reproduction. Not all feminists accept this biological argument as an adequate

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explanation for the subordination and exploitation of women, however. Many feminists
have pointed out that there is a need to distinguish between the biological capacity to
have children and the social role of parenting. It is assumed in many societies that
because women have children they will look after them. But, as Miriam David (1985)
has pointed out: ‘Motherhood is a social concept, fatherhood barely recognised. To
father a child [as noted above] refers only to the act of procreation’ (p. 32). Not only is
motherhood a social construction, it is also a historically and culturally specific concept,
in terms of its being seen as a woman’s chief vocation and primary identity. In Britain,
it developed among the middle classes during the industrial revolution as part of the
new ideology of domesticity and womanhood. By the end of the nineteenth century
a woman’s primary duty was seen as having and caring for her children.
Motherhood is often thought of as a vocation for women. Indeed, in the former
Communist states it is increasingly argued that women ought to remain at home and
care for their children as a patriotic act. This is because demographic research in Russia
suggests that the country’s population is currently shrinking by about 1 million people
annually and the Russian birth rate has lowered to only 2.6 children per household
(Therborn, 2004). The media subtext is that women are to blame for Russia’s shrinking
population.
In most societies motherhood is regarded as something that women are naturally
good at and derive great emotional satisfaction from. Women are seen as responsible
for the care and control of their children. When something goes wrong – when children
develop health or social problems, for instance, the mother is often blamed; she is seen
as inadequate or negligent. In the early part of the twentieth century in Britain women
were blamed for high infant mortality rates and the poor health of their children.
While there was considerable evidence that the real underlying causes were poor
housing, poverty and appalling environmental conditions, women were blamed for
not being hygienic in the home and for not providing adequate nutrition. In the period
after the Second World War the popular theories of psychoanalysts such as Winnicott
and Bowlby led to an emphasis on the need for mothers to care for their pre-school
children full-time. Mothers who did not do so were in danger of raising delinquents and
badly adjusted children, it was argued. These ideas continue to have widespread
popular appeal despite considerable evidence that it is the quality of care and not the
quantity nor the biological identity of the person giving it that is important, and that
young children benefit from forming attachments to a variety of adults and child-
ren. Interestingly, upper-class parents who employ nannies and who send their children
away to boarding schools at a young age are rarely accused of neglecting them in
the same way as working-class or single-parent mothers who have to work outside
of the home are.
The ideal of motherhood as a full-time vocation has shaped our thinking about
women and mothering. Women’s primary identity is often defined as wife and mother
– a vocation that is thought to enable them to fulfil their emotional needs. However,
as we noted above, feminists have pointed out that there is a wide gap between the
ideal and the reality. Parenting is hard work – children require constant care and
attention – and is generally carried out in isolation. Ann Oakely (1974a) found that the
housewives in her study enjoyed caring for their children more than the other aspects
of their work. Nevertheless, many of them felt isolated and missed the company of

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other adults during the day. Oakley suggested that, given the disjuncture between the
ideal and the reality of mothering, we should not be surprised at how many women
experience post-natal depression, but rather at how few do so.
Research by Brown and Harris (1978) found that women at home with pre-school
children were at highest risk from clinical depression, largely because ‘they are the
buffer and absorber of stresses of the other members of the family’. They suggested
that women often coped by turning the stress in on themselves. Hilary Graham (1984)
has argued similarly that working-class mothers with young children smoke cigarettes
as a way of coping – sitting down with a cigarette is the one peaceful time they have.
Despite all this evidence the myth persists that motherhood is a universally satisfying
and fulfilling role for women. Helen Roberts (1985) found that general practitioners
could not understand why the married women who came to them reporting depressive
symptoms were dissatisfied. They could not see that a married woman with a good
husband, lovely children and a nice home could be unhappy.
Gendered assumptions about women’s natural roles structure women’s lives, not
only in families, but in education and the world of work. Women are seen as ‘natural’
carers because of their role as actual or potential mothers (see Chapter 9). Employment
opportunities are often limited because employers assume that motherhood is more
central to women’s lives than a career. This affects all women, and indeed the limited
job opportunities and the low pay that women receive may actually push women
into marriage and motherhood (Walby, 1986, 1990). Ann Oakley (1974a) found that
many of the housewives she interviewed reported that when they got married they
wanted to have children in order to escape from boring jobs. (Interestingly, many
of them found being a housewife even more boring and could not wait to get back
to work!) It could also be argued that because most women have to get married, to
have access to a living wage, having children is the price they have to pay. Other
women may, on the other hand, regard marriage as the price they have to pay to have
children.
Because motherhood is presented as a natural and desirable role for women,
abortion of unwanted pregnancy is often seen as unnatural and even horrific.
Contraceptive use is relatively widespread in most Western societies but in transitional
or developing societies (in Central and Eastern Europe, or in sub-Saharan and West
Africa, for instance) access to contraception is limited and the number of unwanted
pregnancies, particularly amongst young women, is still large (www.un.org). Abortion
rates are the highest in the world in these societies and in the early 1990s, the
number of abortions was equal to (or in some areas higher than) the number of live
births. During the 1990s, as contraceptive measures became more easily available,
the number of abortions began to decrease in most countries. In Kazakhstan, for
example, the abortion rate decreased from 60.7 to 32 per thousand between 1990 and
1999, largely as a result of reproductive health promotion campaigns (www.unece.org).
Feminists have campaigned for many years in Britain and the USA to defend their
right to abortion, but it is still relatively difficult for married women to get abortions,
since it is often thought that they should want to have children.
Similarly, women who become commercial surrogate mothers are often thought
of either as exploited victims, or as heartless and unnatural profit-seekers. In her
discussion of surrogate motherhood, Rosemary Tong noted that when a woman

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consents to become a commercial surrogate mother, such apparently ‘free’ choices

must be understood within their economic context. As she puts it,

Most surrogate mothers, like prostitutes, are much poorer than the people to
whom they sell their services. Unable to get a decent job, a woman may be driven
to sell her body if it is the only thing she has that anyone seems to value enough
to buy. But to say that a woman ‘chooses’ to do this . . . is to say that when a
woman is forced to choose between being poor and being exploited, she may
choose being exploited as the lesser of two evils.
(Tong, 1997, pp. 200–201)

One interesting development in recent years, in Western societies particularly,

is the trend towards having children later in life, or not at all. In the UK for instance,
the average (mean) age of women giving birth in 2002 was 29.3 years (and 27.3 years
for women at first birth). Fertility rates for women in London and the south-east of
England are currently higher among women in their early thirties than in their twenties
(www.statistics.gov.uk). Much like those women who terminate unwanted pregnancies,
women who choose not to have children often tend to be regarded in largely negative
terms – as unnatural, defective, selfish or tragic. Ironically, those women who postpone
having children until they have begun to establish a career for themselves (as increasing
numbers of women in the West are doing) and then find their fertility has declined
tend to be seen as ‘doubly deviant’. In this context, and partly as a result of develop-
ments in medical technologies in recent years, various forms of assisted reproduction
are increasingly used by women to have children when their own fertility has declined
or has precluded them from becoming pregnant naturally, to have children on their
own, to have children in lesbian partnerships, or to assist others (gay couples, for
instance), in having their own children. (For a feminist discussion of some of the issues
surrounding motherhood and assisted reproduction see Wallbank, 2001.)

Conclusions

Feminists have argued that family ideology has constructed the bourgeois nuclear
family as natural and inevitable. While some feminists have located the cause of
women’s subordination in the family, others have argued that wider social and eco-
nomic processes and structures influence women’s decisions to get married and have
children. Women’s experiences of family life are mediated by their differing locations
within patriarchal, racist and capitalist society, and within global power relations.
In spite of social and economic changes in the last thirty or so years, gender divisions
remain pervasive features of families – women continue to be responsible for the
greater part of domestic labour and in the main are at least partially economically
dependent on their male partners.
That said, dramatic changes have taken place in the family and the household in
recent decades in many parts of the world. Such transformations have generated
considerable controversy, with advocates of traditional ‘family values’ opposing
supporters of new family forms and diverse ways of living together. Sociologist Judith

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Stacey has advocated a rejection of traditional family forms and values, arguing that
the family perpetuates and enhances various kinds of social inequality. Families, she
argues, play a key role in maintaining a range of social divisions and inequalities based
on social class (transferring wealth as well as cultural capital from one generation to
another), gender (many families are patriarchal and so subject women and children
to men’s authority), and sexuality (familial ideology perpetuates the idea that hetero-
sexuality is both normal and natural – see Chapter 8). Stacey therefore celebrates what
she argues are signs that the traditional family (the ‘cereal-packet’ norm) is beginning
to break down and regards this as a measure of social progress.
Whatever position one takes on the family, and the likely implications of recent
trends in its formation, change seems certain to continue as the family has always
been, as we noted at the outset of this chapter, a dynamic social phenomenon.
Macionis and Plummer (2002, pp. 457–458) make five predictions about the future of
family life. These are:

1 divorce rates are likely to remain high;

2 family life will be highly variable;
3 men are likely to play a more active role in parenting;
4 economic changes will continue to reform marriage and the family;
5 the importance of new reproductive technologies will increase.

SUMMARY

1 Whereas malestream sociologists have emphasised the ways in which

the family serves the interests of society as a whole (functionalists) or
of capitalism (Marxists), feminists have argued that the family is one
of the key sites of oppression for women, whether it is capitalism,
men as a class or both that benefit from this.
2 Feminists have looked at various factors associated with women’s
position within the family: marriage, violence within the family, the
domestic division of labour, women’s relative economic dependency
and the gender relations of parenting.
3 Women experience a wide variety of household arrangements and
feminists have been concerned to endorse these. However, there is
also a strong familial ideology that is reinforced through state
legislation, media culture and institutional structures. This ideology
represents the patriarchal nuclear family as the natural and normal way
to live.
4 There is some evidence, however, that the strength of this familial
ideology is beginning to weaken and that an increasingly diverse range
of family forms is beginning to emerge in a range of societies.

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FURTHER READING

Silva, E. and Smart, C. (eds) The New Family? London: Sage. This edited collection, featuring both
theoretical and empirical contributions by contemporary sociologists adopting a range of
perspectives, focuses on recent changes in the family. It develops a critique of familial ideologies,
and highlights the discrepancy between policies based on how families should function, and
how they are experienced. Gender inequalities in family life are a theme throughout.
Therborn, G. (2004) Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900–2000. London: Routledge.
Written from a pro-feminist perspective, this comprehensive book surveys the ways in which
the family changed during the course of the twentieth century. It is effectively a global history
and sociology of the family focusing on the rights and powers of men as fathers and husbands;
on marriage, cohabitation and extra-marital sexuality, and on reproduction. It considers,
theoretically and empirically, how the major family systems of the world have formed and
developed, and concludes by predicting what changes the family might experience during the
course of the twenty-first century.
Wallbank, J.A. (2001) Challenging Motherhood(s) London: Prentice Hall. This book critically
examines contemporary social and legal constructions of motherhood with reference to a
critique of the discussion of families in Western, and particularly British, sociology. A number
of themes are considered, including the regulation of family life, gendered issues of child support,
and particularly political and media representations of single parents. It also considers discourses
on motherhood, reflecting on the ways in which these have developed according to a particular
set of Western ideals as to what motherhood could or should entail. It also reflects on the
capacity of women to challenge dominant discourses.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Health, illness and caring

Health is an issue of central concern to women. Women form the majority of health
care workers; are responsible, in the family, for the health of others, and are the major
consumers of formal health care. However, until the development of feminist sociology
little attention was paid to gender as a key variable in understanding health. Feminists
have reopened the history of women healers, explored the roles that women play in
the health care system, analysed the ways in which health inequalities affect women,
pointed to the ways in which medical power is used to control women and the ways
in which doctors have taken away control over pregnancy and childbirth from women
and medicalised what women have perceived as a natural process. More recently,
feminists have focused on the informal health care work done by women, pointing out
that much of the caring work women do in the domestic sphere is concerned with
promoting the health of household members. Women also play a key role in the lay
referral system – the system in which decisions are made about whether to visit the
doctor or not, or what other action should be taken. In the process of highlighting the
key role that women play as unpaid health care workers, feminists have also drawn
attention to the ways in which conflicts develop between informal and paid providers,
and the extent to which paid providers are unaware of the needs of the unpaid carer.
The unpaid carer is often invisible, the focus of attention being the patient, so that
the needs of a woman caring, for example, for 24 hours a day, seven days a week for
an ill or disabled relative are often ignored (see e.g. Lewis, 2003). A key point here is
that the paid providers are themselves often women, yet because they work within the
dominant medical paradigm they fail to identify with the unpaid carers and assume that
women are ready, willing and able to provide the constant care demanded of them.
Indeed, it may be argued that woman are ‘coerced’ into caring. The implementation
of the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990 in Britain reinforced this
view of women as carers, with its emphasis on the role of informal care.
Furthermore the increased emphasis on care in the community means that
resources are being concentrated on those who would otherwise have to be taken into
residential care. Beyond this, developments in medical technology and the early dis-
charge of patients from hospital can all add to the demands made on lay carers, the
majority of whom are women, many of them giving up paid employment or at least
some part of their earning capacity in order to be carers. The rhetoric may emphasise
supporting informal carers, but the reality is often that the resources are not available
(Ackers and Abbott, 1996; Land, 2003; Baldock, 2003).

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The multiple roles that women play affect their physical and mental well-being.
Women and men have different health care needs; men are more likely to have
accidents while they are young, but only women give birth to children. Most research
into work and ill health has focused on male-dominated occupations; little attention
has been paid to the health hazards of work roles where women predominate, and
even less to those of the housewife. Similarly, research into health inequalities has
focused on differences between social classes or between deprived and non-deprived
households; little attention has been paid to differences in the health experiences
of women and men, nor has account been taken of the ways in which resources are
distributed within households, often meaning that some members are deprived while
others are not. Indeed, poor women with young children bear a particularly heavy
burden (Lahelma et al., 2002; Bradshaw, 2003; Graham, 1993) and this has adverse
consequences for their health. Jennie Popay and Jill Jones (1990) have reported on
the poor health of mothers bringing up children alone, compared with those in two-
parent families. There is evidence to suggest that when resources are limited women
do without in order to ensure that their husbands and children are adequately provided
for, while Brown and Harris (1978) suggested that women at home with young children
are more likely than others to suffer from clinical depression.
One reason why gendered inequalities within families tend to be overlooked
may be that there are dilemmas in dealing with them. As Lesley Doyal (2000) points
out, if health resources are limited, giving more to women must be at the expense
of men and attacking women’s greater morbidity will entail greater morbidity (or
perhaps even mortality) for men. Similar considerations apply to material resources
as a whole: ‘Men on the edge of poverty, for example, might be dragged down below
subsistence if their income had to be shared equally with their wives’ (p. 937). It is not
immediately evident what incentive men would have for co-operating with this kind
of rearrangement, other than a sense of equity.
The discourse of health assumes that women will care for the members of their
family when they are unwell and takes for granted, as natural, the health care work
that women do in the domestic sphere. It also assumes that mothers will prioritise the
needs of their children, putting their needs and care above their own needs – that
women will, if necessary, sacrifice themselves for their children. (Full-time carers do
this even without knowing: women who have full-time employment as well as domestic
‘duties’, in advanced industrial societies, report better physical and mental health than
do full-time domestic carers.) The discourse also, paradoxically, defines as health
care only the formal health care provision supplied by the state and private paid medi-
cine. Health care is seen as provided by doctors, nurses, health visitors, and so on;
the health care provided by women in the home is not defined as such; rather it is seen
as an integral aspect of their caring role in the family (see e.g. Land, 2003).

Women and medicine

During the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientific medicine came
to dominate health care in the Western world and doctors have achieved a high social
status and considerable power. In Britain the National Health Service provides health
care free at point of delivery to all citizens, and we generally regard this as ‘a good

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thing’. We regard medicine as something good that has improved the health of the
nation and alleviates pain and suffering. We tend to argue that what we want is more:
more hospitals, more doctors, more nurses, more research, and so on; then there would
be an improvement in health. Historically, however, improvement in health has often
come from raised living standards, changes in behaviour and general public health
reforms rather than from specific advances in medical knowledge. Jane Lewis (1980),
for example, suggests that the decline in the maternal mortality rate in Britain in the
1930s and 1940s was as much due to improvement in the diet of pregnant women as
to medical advances. Today, a decline in female deaths from lung cancer, for example,
is much more likely to come from women stopping smoking, and indeed from the
elimination of pressures in women’s lives that led them to smoke, than from advances
in treatment. This is not to deny that medical advances improve health in some
instances and reduce mortality (death) and morbidity (illness), but to point out that
preventive measures are often more effective than curative ones and indeed are less
costly in the long run.
Western scientific medicine is said to be objective and value-free, and doctors are
seen as medical scientists who are objective about their patients in much the same way
as any other scientists are about their subject matter. Medical science progresses via
the scientific method (the experiment and specifically the randomised controlled trial),
resulting in the acquisition of certain, objective and unchallengeable facts and an
autonomous and value-free body of knowledge. However, there are problems with this
view of science, which sociologists have challenged in general and specifically with
respect to medicine. Sociologists argue that all scientific activity is inevitably influenced
by the society in which it is carried out and that the scientist often plays a major role
in explaining and ultimately justifying various aspects of the way in which a society is
organised.
Furthermore, feminists regard medical knowledge as highly gendered and part
of the means by which gender divisions in society are maintained – modern medicine
acts as a form of patriarchal control over women. Medicine not only reflects discrimi-
natory views of women but serves to reproduce these views by actively stereotyping
and controlling women who deviate from them. The way in which women were seen
as weak and in need of constant rest by the medical profession in the nineteenth
century, thus justifying, for instance, their exclusion from higher education, is one
example. More recently the US radical feminist Mary Daly has argued that modern
medicine has actually exercised more control over women as a ‘backlash’ response
to the rise of feminism. She argues that there is:

every reason to see the mutilation and destruction of women by doctors

specialising in unnecessary radical mastectomies and hysterectomies, carcino-
genic hormone therapy, psychosurgery, spirit-killing psychiatry and other forms
of psychotherapy as directly related to the rise of radical feminism in the twentieth
century.
(Daly, 1978, p. 228)

Women often experience the health care system as paternalistic, and their own
experiences and knowledge are ignored or downgraded. This has been especially

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highlighted in the area of pregnancy and childbirth and it is also true with respect to
contraception. In terms of women’s informal caring roles, their own knowledge and
understanding of the patient is frequently dismissed as irrelevant. Often, feminists
argue, medical intervention does more harm than good, and in other cases it offers
palliation rather than a cure. In childbirth, for example, it has been suggested that many
procedures that became routinised, such as routine episiotomy, are of dubious benefit
to mother or child. More recently there has been considerable debate about the
prescribing of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopausal women, which
has become seen as a panacea for menopausal problems. In medical literature the
menopause has been transformed from a natural, non-problematic event to a defi-
ciency disease – ‘curable’ by HRT (Foster, 1995). While there is considerable clinical
and patient evidence that HRT alleviates physical menopausal symptoms, there is less
evidence that it assists with psychological problems. Claims have also been made that
HRT reduces the possibility of older women having heart disease, strokes and
osteoporosis, but less emphasis has been placed on the possible long-term and serious
side effects – increased risk of both endometrial and breast cancer; and even less on
the immediate ones – fluid retention, weight gain, breast tenderness, abdominal
cramps, irritability, nausea and vomiting (Kahn and Holt, 1989). Peggy Foster (1995)
concludes that:

it is perfectly logical to support the prescribing of HRT as a treatment for the

more severe physical symptoms of the menopause while opposing its growing use
as a panacea for all the problems women associate with ageing, including losing
their looks.
(Foster, 1995, p. 82)

Similarly, the giving of tranquillisers to housewives with depression only renders

the intolerable more tolerable; it does nothing to alleviate the underlying causes of
depression.

Women and health inequalities

Gender inequalities in health care provision and the ways in which the specific health
care needs of women are ignored have been highlighted by feminists – including the
ways in which the focus on explaining male mortality has obscured the millions of
premature deaths that women experience simply because they are women (for
example, through domestic violence, botched abortions, dowry deaths and as a result
of the inequitable distribution of resources between men and women – see Freedman
and Maine, 1993). So also have the ways in which medical intervention is used as
much to increase the power and prestige of medical men as to improve the health of
women, and the questionable benefits of much medical intervention to its receivers.
Marxist feminists have highlighted inequalities in health care and the ways in which
the health care system serves the needs of a capitalist society. A ‘cultural critique’ has
questioned the view that medicine, as a science, is value-free and objective, that
doctors as professionals are knowledgeable and concerned with meeting the health

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care needs of clients, that medical intervention is always of benefit to clients and that
the dramatic reductions in ill health and general improvements in health achieved in
industrial countries in the last hundred years are due to advances in medical know-
ledge. The concern that feminists have expressed, then, is not just that women’s health
needs are ignored, nor that medicine is sexist, but that modern medicine itself may
be less valuable than is claimed. The actual technical competence of doctors and of
modern medicine needs to be scrutinised. It is argued that doctors exhibit massive
ignorance on such subjects as birth control, menstruation, breastfeeding, the manage-
ment of childbirth, the menopause, vaginal infections, and so on. (See e.g. Foster, 1995;
Doyal, 1995)
The publication of the Black Report (1978) on health inequalities in Britain
stimulated investigations into the existence, extent and causes of health inequalities.
It was of course recognised that health inequalities between northern and southern
regions were due to poverty and deprivation. What the Black Report revealed was
that within an affluent society, with a national health service providing free medical
care, there were still large and systematic differences in mortality between social
classes. Sociologists have developed materialist and structuralist accounts to explain
these. They have argued that the major causes of health inequalities are material
inequalities – that the reason why the working class have higher mortality (death) rates
and higher levels of morbidity (illness) is material deprivation. More recently, they
have been concerned with exploring the pathways that link material circumstances
to health outcomes. Three broad positions have emerged:

1 A structuralist explanation arguing that health (or rather, mortality) outcomes are
mainly the direct result of the impact of material conditions and in particular of the
unequal access to resources related to welfare regimes.
2 An ‘action theory’ approach that identifies social capital as a major intervening
variable, with a particular emphasis on psychosocial responses to inequality and
lack of social cohesion and social support.
3 A ‘healthy lifestyles’ approach arguing that culturally shared practices formed by
socialisation and experience and shaped by material circumstances result in
materially deprived groups leading unhealthy lifestyles.

(For a further discussion see Abbott, 2004.)

However, the priority in such research has been on investigating men’s health
(and in particular mortality) and the work hazards of male-dominated occupations.
Little attention has been paid to the health hazards of women’s paid and unpaid work.
Research into causes of coronary heart disease, for example, primarily focuses on
men, who are more likely to die prematurely than women, yet more women die of
diseases of the circulatory system in the UK than men – 409.5 per hundred thousand
population for women in 2001 compared with 394.8 for men. Researchers have been
concerned about the dramatic increase in male mortality in mid-life, from heart disease
and external causes, while in the former Soviet Union following the collapse of
communism in 1991, they have ignored (or naturalised) the poor health of women
(Abbott, 2004).

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Although it is recognised that men and women do have different health experi-
ences, little account has been taken of the sex/gender system in examining the pattern
of health and illness. Thus research has failed to explain why it is that although men
die on average at a younger age than women, women appear to suffer more ill health
than men. Men die at a relatively younger age from the illness they contract or from
the injuries they suffer, while women live on.
There are social class differences between women in terms of life expectancy.
Women married to men employed in semi- or unskilled jobs are 70 per cent more
likely to die prematurely than those whose husbands are in a professional or managerial
occupation. Furthermore, women in social classes IV and V have higher mortality
rates than men in social classes I and II, despite the overall tendency for women to
live longer than men. The main influence on women’s self-assessed health remains
the degree of affluence or poverty of her household living circumstances (Arber, 1997)
rather than class position as determined by her own occupation. The class differences
in health relate not just to immediate experience but to experience over the life course;
deprivation in childhood affects adult health. Class is inscribed in our bodies and
accounts for the socio-economic gradients in health (Graham, 2002).
There is strong evidence that in Western countries women’s multiple roles (often
married, with children and paid employment) protects women’s health (Lahelma et al.,
2002). While household economic circumstances are the main determinant of self-
reported health in post-Soviet societies, there is no evidence that multiple roles have
any positive or negative effect on it (Abbott, 2004).
The gendered health pattern is found in all societies – women on average live
longer than men and there are social class differences between women, although the
male–female gap in life expectancy does vary significantly between countries. Of
particular interest in this respect has been the significant growth in the male–female
mortality gap in the former USSR, with Russia now having the largest male–female gap
in life expectancy in the world, of about fourteen years. This is in sharp contrast to some
of the countries of Southeast Asia, as well as parts of sub-Saharan and West Africa,
where the gap is much smaller or even eliminated altogether, mainly due to the low
value placed on female children (see Chapter 5). However, studies in Britain have
indicated that women rate their own health as worse than men rate theirs (Whitehead,
1987) and the same has been found in post-Soviet societies (Abbott, 2004). Thus,
despite their longer life expectancy, women report more illness and disease than
men. However, there is considerable debate about whether women have poorer health
than men across the life course or whether the excess in women’s poor health is
related to their longer life expectancy. Analysis of UK data suggests that it is only for
the oldest age groups that there is an excess of poor physical health among females,
although women across the life course report poorer socio-psychological health than
men, and similar analyses have been made for other Western countries. However,
in the former USSR, women do report poor physical and psychological health across
the life course (Abbott, 2004).
Women of all social classes consult their general practitioners more often than do
men, consume more drugs and medicines than men, occupy acute hospital beds
slightly more often and are admitted to psychiatric units more often than men (Kane,
1991). Female consultation rates with GPs for depression are three times those of men

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(Royal College of General Practitioners, 1990). One in twenty women aged between
25 and 74 seeks help from her GP for emotional problems, compared with one in fifty
men in Britain. Across a number of developed countries women are twice as likely as
men to be prescribed tranquillisers (Ashton, 1991) and women report significantly
higher levels of psychosocial problems than men in Russia and other Eastern European
and Central Asian countries (Abbott, 2004). Again there are social class differences.
Women married to men in the lowest social classes suffer three times more long-
standing illness than do those in the highest social classes.
However, it is not the case that we can determine the relative health experience
of different groups from the amount that they consult doctors or make use of the health
services. Women of the lowest social classes, for example, make more use of the
health services than the more affluent, but not to the extent that their much greater
health problems would suggest that they should (LeGrand, 1982). Preventive ser-
vices are used least by the women who suffer most from the problems that these
services are intended to forestall (Doyal, 1987). A good example here is screening for
cervical cancer. Although women married to men in social class V are four times more
likely to die of cancer of the cervix than women married to men in social class I, they
make much less use of the screening facilities than middle-class women; the difference
in death rate between working-class and middle-class women is not fully explained
by differential use of the preventive services. There is also a marked social class
gradient in the use of services connected with fertility control. Women married to men
in middle-class occupations are much more likely than women married to manual
workers to attend family planning clinics or discuss fertility control with general
practitioners. Inequalities are also evident with regard to abortion. While working-
class and Black women argue that they are often pressured into having an abortion,
other women point out how difficult it is to get one – especially on the NHS. In fact,
in the UK most abortions are performed outside of the NHS.
It is necessary to consider, if women’s greater use of health services suggests
that women are sicker than men, why working-class women make less use of preven-
tive services than middle-class ones, and why working-class women make less use of
the health services than their health problems would suggest they need. Some feminists
have suggested that women’s life experiences mean that they suffer more ill health
than men. Others have argued that this is an artefact – that women’s greater use of
health services is due to factors other than that they are suffering more ill health than
men. It should be noted, however – as we have already pointed out – that women
report poorer physical and psychosocial health than men overall, and there is no
evidence that women are more likely to report trivial conditions than men (Adamson
et al., 2003). Explanations that stress the different life experiences of women are:

1 the biological – that women suffer more problems as a result of their reproductive
functions than do men (Kane, 1991);
2 that the isolation of women in unpaid domestic labour seems to be linked with a
higher incidence of depression among women (Brown and Harris, 1978; Ussher,
1989); and
3 lifestyle – that women have healthier lifestyles than men, and in particular that they
eat a healthier diet, drink less alcohol and are less likely to ‘binge drink’ than men.

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Peggy Foster has pointed out that the biological and feminist models of women’s
need for health care both assume that it is women who rely on health care providers.
She argues that:

any dependency relationship between women and health care providers is at

least partly the other way round . . . all those employed in the manufacturing and
delivery of health care need women to consume their work as much as, if not
more than, women need the type of products and services provided.
(Foster, 1995, p. 3)

Those that stress the artefactual nature of the difference suggest:

1 that women often visit the doctor on behalf of others, especially children (Graham,
1984);
2 that female socialisation in Western cultures makes it more acceptable for women
to adopt the ‘sick role’, or that male socialisation makes men less likely to adopt it;
3 that women are subject to the ‘medicalisation’ of normal childbirth (Lesson and
Gray, 1978; Oakley, 1980);
4 that women live longer than men (the ratio of women to men aged 75+ is 2:1, and
increasing), and older people tend to have more health problems than younger
ones.

Other research suggests that consultation rates are a poor guide to the amount
of illness suffered in the community, and that women are more likely than men to
‘suffer in silence’. Scambler and Scambler (1984) found that women do not necessarily
visit the doctor when they are unwell. Helen Roberts (1985) found that women differed
in the extent to which they visited the doctor and divided them into the frequent
attenders and the infrequent attenders. She did not find that the latter group suffered
less ill health than the former, but rather that they differed in their views as to when the
doctor should be consulted. The infrequent attenders argued that the doctor should
only be visited when this was essential, the frequent attenders that the doctor
should be visited when one was unwell, before things became too bad. Both groups
were concerned with not wasting the doctor’s time, but while the former group argued
that this meant only going when it was essential, the latter argued that the doctor
should be visited at the first signs of illness to prevent a lot of time having to be spent
treating a serious illness.
Scambler and Scambler found that women differentiated between illness that
required a visit to the doctor and illness where alternative methods were indicated.
Thus women often experience suffering but do not regard themselves as ill. A similar
situation was noted some sixty years ago in the Workers’ Health Enquiry into the lives
of working-class women:

many women replied ‘yes’ to the question, ‘Do you usually feel fit and well?’ In
answer to the next question, ‘What ailments do you suffer from?’, the same women
listed a whole series of problems including anaemia, headaches, constipation,
rheumatism, prolapse of the womb, bad teeth and varicose veins.
(Spring-Rice, 1981 [1939], p. 69)

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As is the case today, certain ‘ailments’ had to be suffered, but the women were
‘well enough to carry on’. Women’s domestic and caring roles mean that they cannot
be ill because they have to care for their families. Williams (1987) found in Aberdeen
that fatigue or weakness did not constitute ‘illness’, and ‘fit’ meant being able to work.
Jocelyn Cornwell (1984), in her study in Bethnal Green, also found that women
regarded themselves as ‘not ill’ if they could ‘carry on’. Pill and Stott (1986) suggest,
from their study of 204 women in Cardiff, that working-class women have a low
expectation of health and that the women were not accustomed to thinking particularly
about their health. Women are also the ones who decide when their husbands and
children are ill and may adopt the sick role (Locker, 1981).
It is also important to consider why working-class women make less use of health
services than middle-class women when we take into account the health needs of both
groups; and make less use of preventive services. There has been a tendency to blame
the working-class woman, to suggest that she is less able to perceive the benefit of the
services offered, especially preventive ones. However, feminists have suggested
that it is necessary to turn the question around and ask what is wrong with the way the
services are provided. They argue that often the provision does not meet the needs
of the woman, that there are no arrangements to care for the young children they often
have to bring with them, that working-class women find it difficult to communicate
with middle-class professionals, and that the women are aware that the main causes
of their ill health (children, housing, lack of money, and so on) lie outside the province
of the medical profession and also outside their own control (Pill and Stott, 1986;
Blaxter, 1985; Cornwell, 1984). While working-class and Black women experience
the greatest control from health professionals – at the extreme, being pressured into
having unwanted abortions or being prescribed Depo-Provera (a long-term birth
control measure with serious side effects, banned in the US) without informed consent
– feminists argue that all women are controlled by medical ideology. A key example
here would be the way in which male doctors have come to control pregnancy and
childbirth (see e.g. Oakley, 1980, 1984a).
Radical feminists emphasise the ways in which male medical ideology is used
to control women, and feminists in the US in particular have strongly attacked the
exploitative nature of the American health care system. Marxist feminists, meanwhile,
have been concerned to point to health inequalities between women from different
social classes and ethnic groups and the ways in which the state controls the health
care system to meet the needs of capitalist society. Lesley Doyal (1987) suggested
that the NHS was a powerful mechanism of social control both because it appeared
to be a major move to meet the needs of the working class and because it served the
interests of the capitalist class by ensuring a healthy workforce (although she was also
critical of the male doctors’ patriarchal, sexist attitudes towards their female patients).
However, despite over fifty years of the NHS the inequalities in health between women
from different social classes persist, and while the health of all women has improved,
relative inequalities have remained the same – or even increased to some extent.
Indeed, it could be argued that the NHS has failed to meet the specific needs of women
because the ways in which services are provided do not enable women to make full use
of them. Lack of facilities for caring for young children, the timing of appointments,
the centralisation of provision and the attitudes of the profession have all been cited
as reasons why services have not been used.

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Iatrogenic medicine

Some medical intervention, it is suggested, is iatrogenic – that is, it causes more harm
than good; the treatment actually causes more symptoms and side effects than the
original illness. We have already mentioned the side effects of hormone replacement
therapy, prescribed for menopausal women. Another good example is the use of a
particular drug to treat arthritis. Some patients who were prescribed the drug, which
relieves the pain of arthritis, ended up with poor health as a result of the so-called ‘side
effects’ of the drug, such as an inability to tolerate daylight. However, with women’s
health there is greater concern because some drugs or treatments that are prescribed
on a routine basis, not to treat illness but to prevent unwanted pregnancies, have been
found to be iatrogenic. The ‘coil’, for example, has been found to cause extensive
menstrual bleeding and low back pain in some women. However, the main cause for
concern has been the contraceptive pill, the most reliable method of contraception
available to most women.
The pill was introduced into the US in 1960 and has subsequently been used
by millions of women throughout the world. It was seen as an effective, modern and
scientifically respectable method for controlling fertility and was freely prescribed
by doctors to women of childbearing age. However, by the mid-1960s it began to be
suspected that there was a link between the pill and cancer of the cervix and circulatory
(heart) diseases. Attempts to assess the validity of this suspicion uncovered serious
deficiencies in the testing of contraceptive drugs. It was found that they had not been
tested on women for the whole period of the reproductive cycle, so that the possible
effects of taking the pill for twenty or thirty years were unknown. A study by the Royal
College of General Practitioners in 1974 found that the risk of dying from circulatory
disease was five times greater for women taking the oral contraceptive pill than
for others. Women who were over 35 years old who had been taking the pill for five
or more years and who smoked were found to be at the greatest risk. The pill has also
been found to have a number of side effects – depression, a loss of libido (sex drive),
headaches, nausea and excessive weight gain – but there has been little research into
these. Furthermore, the subjective experiences and feelings of women have often been
dismissed as irrelevant or ‘not real’ by medical men. Indeed, research indicates that
GPs strongly prefer the pill, especially for young women, and the medical profession
seem to have few doubts about its safety (Reid, 1985) and feel that women are un-
necessarily worried about it (Tindall, 1987). Similarly, there is medical confidence in
Depo-Provera and the IUD (see Wilson, 1985; Guillebaud and Low, 1987; and
an editorial in The Lancet, 28 March 1992). However, in the United States most drug
companies ceased researching, developing and manufacturing contraceptive drugs
nearly fifteen years ago because of the escalating costs of testing the product and
the high price of the insurance needed to protect them against lawsuits from those
damaged by their products (Lincoln and Kaeser, 1988).
It has by now, and as a result of availability of such devices as the pill and the
coil, become generally accepted that it should be women who take the responsibility
for birth control precautions, and it is women who suffer the serious consequences if
contraception fails. (This has changed to some small extent, however, with the AIDS
risk and the emphasis on using condoms and barrier cream. However, these are less

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effective as a prevention of pregnancy than they are in preventing the spread of HIV
and other infections.)
It seems unlikely that what are often referred to as the ‘side effects’ of female
contraception would be so readily ignored if men were the users. It would be interesting
to know how many men would be prepared to use the intra-penile device (IPD)
described by Dr Sophie Merkin:

The newest development in male contraception was unveiled recently at the

American Women’s Center. Dr Sophie Merkin of the Merkin Clinic announced
the preliminary findings of a study conducted on 763 unsuspecting male under-
graduates at a large mid-Western university. In her report, Dr Merkin stated
that the new contraceptive – the IPD – was a breakthrough in male contraception.
It will be marketed under the trade name Umbrelly.
The IPD (intra-penile device) resembles a tightly rolled umbrella which is
inserted through the head of the penis and pushed into the scrotum with a plunger-
like device. Occasionally there is a perforation of the scrotum, but this is
disregarded as the male has few nerve-endings in this area of his body. The
underside of the umbrella contains a spermicidal jelly, hence the name Umbrelly.
Experiments on 1000 white whales from the continental shelf (whose sexual
apparatus is said to be closest to man’s) proved the IPD to be 100% effective in
preventing the production of sperm and eminently satisfactory to the female whale
since it does not interfere with her rutting pleasure.
Dr Merkin declared the Umbrelly to be statistically safe for the human
male. She reported that of the 763 undergraduates tested with the device only
two died of scrotal infection, only twenty developed swelling of the testicles and
only thirteen were too depressed to have an erection. She stated that common
complaints ranged from cramping and bleeding to acute abdominal pains. She
emphasised that these symptoms were merely indications that the man’s body
had not yet adjusted to the device. Hopefully the symptoms would disappear
within a year. One complication caused by the IPD and briefly mentioned by
Dr Merkin was the incidence of massive scrotal infection necessitating the surgical
removal of the testicles. ‘But this is a rare case,’ said Dr Merkin, ‘too rare to
be statistically important.’ She and other distinguished members of the Women’s
College of Surgeons agreed that the benefits far out-weighed the risk to any
individual man.
(From Outcome magazine, the East Bay Men’s Center newsletter, and
The Periodical Lunch published by Andrew Rock, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, USA)

This is of course a spoof – no such device has actually been invented. The account was
published to illustrate the fact that most men would not be expected to suffer what
many women experience with an IUD, such as heavy bleeding, backache and vaginal
infections. Indeed, any development at all in this direction is highly unlikely, given that
little attempt has been made to develop and market new methods of contraception
for men (Bruce, 1987).

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While it may be true that women choose what method of contraception to use,
their choice is limited by what is available. Modern methods do enable a woman to
have control over her own fertility, rather than relying on her partner or risking having
an abortion after conception, but her choice is limited by decisions that have already
been made by drug company executives, doctors, researchers and others about which
methods will be developed and made available. Further, given that most methods
have their own problems, the choice is often a negative one. Women choose the
method that affects them least – so one may choose the pill because the IUD caused
excessive bleeding, while another may make the reverse decision because the pill
resulted in excessive weight gain. Medical control of many of the newer methods
of birth control means that women are dependent on their doctors for advice, and
doctors are generally inadequately trained in this area. Most women will have to make
a judgement based on what their doctors tell them, and doctors often become resentful
if female patients question their advice or reveal that they are knowledgeable in the
area. Doctors frequently expect patients to accept that they know best. Yet they rarely
talk to their female patients about birth control in detail and are inclined to dismiss
subjective experience and base their advice on what they regard as sound scientific
judgement. (A further restriction of women’s ability to choose which method of
contraception to use is the preference of their partners. Pollack (1985), for example,
found that many men preferred their partners to use the pill rather than spoil their
pleasure and use a condom.)
Nevertheless, doctors’ non-medical values do influence the decisions they make
about sterilisation and abortion, for example (and about the issue of less drastic means
of contraception – see Hawkes, 1995). While white middle-class women have been
demanding the right to choose to be sterilised or to have an abortion, working-class
and Black women have pointed out that they have often been pressurised into having
an abortion or being sterilised against their inclinations. On the other hand, Rose
Shapiro has suggested that:

The need of family planning organisations and doctors to prevent pregnancy

is so powerful that it manifests itself almost as an irrational fear. The impression
given is that accidental pregnancy is the worst thing that could ever happen to
women and that abortion is an absolute disaster.
(Shapiro, 1987, p. 41)

However, in other parts of the world abortion has been the main or only form of
contraception available to women. Lesley Doyal (1995) indicates that, worldwide,
abortion ranks fourth after female sterilisation, IUDs and contraceptive pills as a
method of contraception. In Russia and other transitional societies abortion has been
seen as the main form of contraception (United Nations, 2003).
While many women have undoubtedly benefited from the development of modern
forms of contraception and these have enabled women to avoid unwanted preg-
nancies, they have nevertheless extended medical and social control over women.
The worldwide market for contraceptive pills and devices is worth billions of dollars,
and it is in the interests of multinational companies to encourage the medical profes-
sion to prescribe and women to use high-tech contraception. Women’s ability to

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control their own fertility has been restricted and heavily controlled by the medical
profession and the multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Gender, power and medicine

The way in which medical men ‘construct’ women is a powerful element in their control
of their female patients. While in the nineteenth century medical men argued that
women were physically frail, in the twentieth century they suggested that they are
mentally weak and easily dissatisfied with their domestic roles. Medical images of
women are of course reinforced by the ways in which medical education is carried out
and the contents of what is taught. Female medical students (and feminist doctors
– see Eisner, 1986) have argued that sexism is rampant in medical training and that
women are often treated as objects of ridicule by (male) lecturers. Men are seen as the
norm against which women – and particularly women’s bodies (see Chapter 5) – are
seen as abnormal.

Medical images of women

Analysis of medical textbooks shows that they include ‘facts’ about women that are
little more than prejudices. They stress the superiority of doctors’ objective knowledge
and clinical experience over women’s own subjective perceptions – even when
women’s own experience is under examination. Little attention is paid in the medical
curriculum to problems specifically suffered by women except those relating to preg-
nancy and childbirth; thus common female problems such as cystitis (bladder infection)
or vaginal infections are not taken seriously and there has been little basic research
into female incontinence and osteoporosis. Even the menstrual cycle has not been
extensively researched (Koblinsky et al., 1993). Gynaecologists and obstetricians are
considered to be experts on women, yet it is a male specialism (see Chapter 9). They
exercise great power vis-à-vis women and are in a position to define ‘normal femininity’
and ‘normal sexuality’. Not only are they often given little training on female sexuality,
but an analysis by Scully and Bart (1978) of the major gynaecology textbooks suggests
that what they are taught is out of date. They found that myths about female sexuality
continued to be stated as facts even after major surveys had revealed them as myths.
Lesley Doyal (1995) points out, furthermore, that when health problems do affect both
men and women, possible gender differences are never explored. For example,
coronary heart disease, more common among women than men, has been researched
in the main on male-only samples.
Doctors tend to see women’s medical problems as emotional and mental
rather than physical. Susan Penfold and Gillian Walker (1984) reviewed a number
of cases where women received a psychiatric diagnosis but were subsequently found
to have a physiological problem. Furthermore, women’s depression is assumed to
arise because of their inherent weakness – because they cannot cope with the demands
of a family, the isolation of domestic labour, combined with paid work, caring respon-
sibilities, and so on. However, the research of Brown and Harris (1978) has suggested

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that depression in women relates primarily to their life circumstances, while the
American feminist Jessie Bernard (1973) has argued that being a housewife makes
women sick because they become depressed and suggested that paid employment
protects women from depression. (However, Arber et al. (1985) have suggested that
married women under the age of 40 with children may suffer more physical illness if
they have full-time paid employment.) Maggie Eisner has referred to the attitude of
male general practitioners and suggested that it is because women have to cope with
their families’ problems that they turn to the GP for emotional support:

A speaker said that women ask their GPs for more emotional support than men
do, implying that women, being weaker than men, have greater need for such
support. I pointed out that the women spend a lot of their time and energy giving
emotional support to many people in their lives and often have no one but the
GP to turn to for their own emotional support.
(Eisner, 1986, p. 121)

Scully and Bart (1978) suggest that doctors ‘blame’ women’s emotional and
hysterical behaviour on the female reproductive tract, and this was certainly the case
in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century doctors argued that women were
controlled by their biology. Women, it was argued, were entirely under the control of
their reproductive organs, and so doctors could provide a ‘scientific’ explanation for
this truth – namely that a malfunctioning uterus could result in the spread of disease
throughout the body (hysteria). Some Victorian doctors thought that women did not
have sexual feelings, while men had strong sexual urges. Instead of sexual urges,
women were said to be endowed with a strong maternal instinct (see Chapter 8), and
their most important duty in life was motherhood.
The upper-class woman in particular was portrayed as frail and sickly – her
delicate nervous system was seen as needing protection as much as her sickly body.
Middle-class women were encouraged to have long periods of rest – especially at
times of menstruation. It was thought especially dangerous for women to engage in
intellectual activity. Higher education was seen as a special danger, and women were
excluded from universities on the grounds that they were a risk both to their health and
to their femininity. It was claimed that a woman who developed ‘masculine’ intellectual
qualities would necessarily fail to develop her ‘female’ qualities, endangering both
her fertility and her capacity for motherhood. While middle- and upper-class women
were encouraged to be idle, working-class women were expected to work, but the
work assigned to them was hard manual labour. Thus the inherent inferiority of women
was used to justify the two very different lifestyles enjoyed by middle- and working-
class women in Victorian England.
The cult of frailty among upper-class and upper-middle-class Victorian women
was strengthened by the view that a man should be able to support a leisured life;
to be able to afford domestic servants was a status symbol. Some Victorian wives
rebelled, but the majority did not because they were totally dependent on their
husbands/fathers. The boredom and confinement of upper-class women resulted in
a cult of hypochondria, and especially hysteria. Doctors argued that it arose from a
morbid condition of the uterus, which began at puberty and ended with the menopause.

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Medical intervention was said to be necessary to establish personal and social control.
‘Cures’ included hysterectomies, clitorectomies, ovarectomies and other forms of
genital mutilation. While most women were not ‘treated’ surgically, they did consult
medical men and came to define themselves as inherently sick – a view that was
reinforced by the view that hysteria was a contagious disease and isolation from other
women was considered essential to successful treatment.
The portrayal of women, and especially upper-class and middle-class ones, as
inherently sick created more work for medical men, which enhanced the status and
income of those who were doctors to wealthy women. It also underpinned doctors’
campaigns against midwifery, as they claimed that all women’s complaints, includ-
ing pregnancy, were diseases and demanded the care of a doctor. It was thus in the
financial interests of doctors, as well as sustaining their claim to exclusive right to treat
the sick, to maintain the view that women were not only weaker than men but also
inherently sick. It also justified the exclusion of women from the public spheres of
education, business and politics and reinforced the view that a woman’s role was in
the domestic sphere and that women’s fulfilment came from motherhood. This view
is still evident in the ways in which women are often treated during pregnancy and
childbirth by the medical profession to this day.

Women, medicine and reproduction

As Lesley Doyal has pointed out,

If women are to maximise their health and their autonomy they must be able to
determine the nature of their reproductive lives . . . they must be able to control
their own fertility without risking unpleasant or dangerous side effects and they
must be able to pass safely through pregnancy and childbirth.
(Doyal, 1995, p. 93)

Medicine is involved in three areas of reproduction:

1 contraception – the prevention of unwanted pregnancy;

2 pregnancy and childbirth; and
3 reproductive technologies designed to enable women who could not otherwise do
so to become pregnant.

While feminists have been critical of medical intervention in these areas, it is

nevertheless important to recognise that there have been positive aspects to this
intervention. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women did face extreme
hazard in childbirth, and many, including upper-class women, had severe complications
and long-term ill health as a result of pregnancy and childbirth, including prolapse
of the uterus and irreparable pelvic tears. Medical advances have made pregnancy and
childbirth a much less hazardous process for both the mother and the child. Medicine
cannot take all the credit – improved diet, hygienic conditions and a general rise in the
standard of living have all played an important role in reducing maternal and infant
mortality and morbidity. Nonetheless, credit is due.

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However, medical dominance in these areas of women’s lives means that women
are controlled to a large extent by medical men, and they rely on doctors for advice
and information. For example, pregnant women are treated ‘as if’ something is going
to go wrong – women are required to make regular ante-natal visits and are often
subject to medical pressure to have their babies in hospital, where doctors control the
management of labour and childbirth. As Ann Oakley (1987) argues, motherhood has
become a medicalised domain.
The key point is not that medical intervention has played no role in making
pregnancy and childbirth safer, but that doctors have taken over total control of the
management of pregnant women, so that women are unable to make informed
decisions about their lives. This came out clearly in the case of Wendy Savage, the
consultant obstetrician who was suspended on a charge of incompetence (of which
she was eventually cleared) after a campaign by her male colleagues, who objected
to the ways in which she practised (see Savage, 1986). During the campaign to clear
her and the subsequent inquiry it became evident that the key issues surrounded how
pregnancy and childbirth were to be managed. Savage argued that women should
be allowed to make informed choices during pregnancy and childbirth, that ante-natal
care should be provided in clinics near women’s homes and that they should be allowed
to give birth at home if they wanted to do so. The role of the doctor was to assist
women, not to control them and make decisions for them.
Feminists have argued not only that women often do not feel in control during
pregnancy and childbirth, but also that there is little evidence to support the view
that technological intervention in childbirth is beneficial for mother and/or child. Ann
Oakley (1982), reporting on research carried out in 1975, found that 69 per cent of
first-time mothers did not feel in control of themselves and what was going on in labour.
She also quotes research carried out in Wales, finding that the increased use of
induction (artificial starting of labour) did not reduce perinatal mortality (death of the
baby in the first two months of life), but did increase the number of low birth-weight
babies. Induction carries risks to both maternal and foetal health – for example, the
tearing of the perineum in the mother and an increased likelihood of a forceps-assisted
birth with its associated risks. There has also been an increase in the use of Caesarean
section without clear evidence that this has improved the health of babies or mothers.
Other routine procedures such as foetal heart monitoring and routine episiotomy
(cutting the perineum to prevent tearing) are also of doubtful benefit.
Feminists have suggested that women and doctors have very different views
about pregnancy and childbirth. During pregnancy, they suggest, the mother is seen
by doctors as a life-support system for the foetus, and the emphasis is on the needs
and health of the baby rather than those of the mother. Doctors regard themselves as
the experts on childbirth and pregnancy. Medical practice is based on the assumption
that doctors have access to a scientific body of knowledge about childbirth, but doctors
deal mainly with illness and they tend to treat pregnancy as if it were a sickness. This
means that they are more interested in the pathological than the normal, in using
technology, and in women taking medical advice.
Graham and Oakley (1981) argue that while doctors see pregnancy as a medical
problem, women see it as a natural phenomenon. While for the doctor pregnancy and
childbirth are medical events starting with diagnosis and ending with discharge from

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medical supervision, for women they are parts of a process which has to be integrated
with other social roles. They are accompanied by a change in status, to mother, with
the obligations that this imposes permanently and comprehensively on a woman’s
life. While for medical men the success of pregnancy and childbirth is measured by
low perinatal and maternal mortality rates and low incidence of certain kinds of
morbidity, and a ‘successful’ outcome is a healthy mother and baby in the immediate
post-birth period, for the mother success is measured by a healthy baby, a satisfactory
personal experience of labour and delivery, the establishment of a satisfactory rela-
tionship with the baby and integrating the demands of motherhood into her lifestyle.
While the doctor sees himself as the expert, possessing superior knowledge and
therefore in control, the mother sees herself as knowledgeable about pregnancy, as
perceptive about the sensations of her body and its needs. However, the mothers
in Graham and Oakley’s research felt they were not in control. Pregnant women spoke
of problems in communicating with their doctors, of not being able to ask questions,
and of being treated as ignorant. They also disliked being seen by different doctors at
each visit and complained that they felt like battery hens – as just one unimportant item
in a factory production system.
While feminists have argued that doctors have medicalised childbirth and in
the process taken away control from women, they have also pointed to medical control
in other areas of reproduction. Doctors control the most effective means of birth con-
trol – the pill, the coil, the cap and sterilisation. Women have to seek medical advice
to be able to use these methods of controlling their fertility. The 1968 Abortion Reform
law made abortion on medical grounds legal and more freely available, but the decision
as to whether a woman can have an abortion is made by doctors. Doctors also control
the new reproductive technologies concerned with helping women to conceive and
have children. Doctors often refuse sterilisation or abortion to young married women
while single women and women from ethnic minority groups are positively encouraged
to have abortions. Doctors also decide which women should have access to repro-
ductive technology, and the decision is often based on moral rather than medical
judgement. (Many health authorities in the UK routinely refer applications for NHS
assistance with reproduction to their Ethics Committees when these are from lesbian
couples, but not necessarily from heterosexual ones, for instance.) Also, access to
reproductive technology and abortion is mediated by ability to pay; NHS provision is
greatly outstripped by demand, so many women are forced to turn to private
practitioners. This option, however, is available only to those with money. Scientific
and medical advances in the area of reproduction have on the one hand given women
the possibility of deciding if, when and under what conditions they will have children.
On the other hand, however, the dominance of so much of reproductive technology
by the medical profession and the state has permitted doctors to have even greater
control over women’s lives.
The development of in vitro fertilisation in the late 1970s, which was seen as
a ‘miracle cure’, has led feminists more recently to turn their attention to what are
commonly described as the ‘new’ reproductive technologies – the medicalisation
of infertility. These include not only technologies that make it possible to extend
parenthood to people who have been unable to realise their wish to have a child, but
also techniques that can be used to diagnose genetic or chromosomal abnormalities

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in utero and which at the same time enable the sex of the child to be determined.
Feminists and disability activists have raised concerns about the ethical issues raised
by these developments (Hughes, 2000). Traditionally, childlessness has been seen
as a punishment or a sign of divine disfavour – the stigma of being barren. IVF offers
infertile couples hope (although many of those treated do not conceive). However,
medicalised reproductive genetics treat the body as a machine and there is a
disjuncture between women exercising agency and the medical imperative to produce
a perfect baby (Ettore, 2002).
While some feminists have been concerned about the availability of the services
on the NHS and the ways in which access to them is controlled by the medical pro-
fession, others have raised questions about the impact that they will have on women’s
lives. Access to infertility treatment is restricted and a majority of infertile women who
undergo techniques such as IVF still do not have a child – 90 per cent of treated women
do not have a baby. Some have suggested that the new technologies will be used by
men to control and exploit women even further. Amniocentesis, it is argued, will be
and has been used to determine the sex of the unborn foetus and force women to have
an abortion if the foetus is not of the desired sex – generally male – while it is very
difficult for a single woman to get IVF treatment, reinforcing the patriarchal ideology
of the heterosexual nuclear family. (Indeed, there is evidence that new technologies
are used to determine sex in India, where male children are valued over female ones
– see Therborn, 2004.)
Other feminists (e.g. Michele Stanworth, 1987) have suggested a more cautious
approach. While recognising the strong desire of some women to have children and
the ways in which they will be assisted by the new technologies, Stanworth suggests
that insufficient attention has been paid to questions of safety, women’s health and
their ability to make informed decisions. Also, it is necessary to recognise that there is
a range of reproductive technologies – not just the various ‘new’ techniques that have
been the focus of public attention. While many of these techniques are flawed and
their safety questionable, nevertheless they provide an indisputable resource on which
women draw according to their priorities. What is necessary is for women to be better
informed about these technologies so that they can make better informed decisions.
While science may be seen as helping women, the control over it is often not in their
hands, but those of doctors.
These issues can be illustrated by reference to ultrasound – a method of enabling
doctors and patients to see an image of the foetus on the screen. Doctors use it to
detect abnormalities and to date conception exactly (women’s knowledge of when they
became pregnant is regarded as unreliable, and some women cannot give an exact
date for the first day of their last period, which is used to date conception). Women
gain great benefit from seeing their own baby in this way (Petchesky, 1987), but,
Ann Oakley (1987) has pointed out that it is not entirely certain that the procedure is
completely safe – it may cause some risk to the health of the mother and/or the foetus.

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Women, health and domestic violence

The ambivalent attitude that feminists adopt to the medical profession and medical
interventions has been highlighted in the attention given to domestic violence as a
health problem. Feminist research on domestic violence has highlighted it as a serious
problem and indicated that it is probably the single most common cause of injury to
women, although health professionals, at least in Britain, appear not to recognise it
as such. Doctors tend to treat the physical injuries and not their cause – the abusive
relationship (Pahl, 1995). Doctors do not see domestic violence as an area for medical
intervention, as Mildred Dealey Payclaw has suggested: ‘Physicians will often say,
“I’m not a law enforcement officer, and I’m not a social worker. I’m here to treat the
body, and she needs to see a psychiatrist”’ (quoted in Journal of the American Medical
Association, 1990).
The issue, as Jan Pahl indicates, is ‘What can health service professionals do to
help women?’ (1995, p. 127). She suggests that health professionals must respect
women’s accounts, know the relevant information to enable them to help women,
keep careful records of injuries and give the time to help women. In the US, Needs
Assessment Profiles have been developed for use with women whom doctors or other
health care workers suspect of having been abused (Jezierski, 1992; Lazzaro and
McFarlane, 1991; Flitcraft et al., 1992).

If abuse is to be prevented, the cycle of violence interrupted and the health and
well being of women provided, nurses in all settings must take the initiative in
assessing all women for abuse during each visit [for ante-natal care] and offering
education, counselling and referral.
(Lazzaro and McFarlane, 1991, p. 28)

However, while health professionals may be able to provide immediate treatment,

the long-term help they can provide is limited, given that the long-term solution to
domestic abuse is giving more power to women, individually and collectively:

Violence against women is the product of the subordination of women. Short-

term measures may have short-term effects . . . but it is certain that no long-term
measures will be successful unless there is a fundamental change in the social and
economic structures that maintain the subordination of women within marriage
and in wider societies.
(United Nations, 1989, p. 108)

The danger is that health professionals medicalise domestic violence, lay the blame
for the violence on the woman victim and ignore the perpetrator of violence and the
context in which the violence took place. Thus on the one hand feminists recognise
that health professionals are in a powerful position to provide help and support for
women who are abused by their partners, while on the other hand they are wary of the
extent to which professionals will be able to move outside patriarchal assumptions
about the family and the causes of domestic violence.

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Women as providers of health care

Women form the majority of health care workers, both formal and informal. Over 75
per cent of all employed health care workers in the UK are women. Women are
concentrated in the lower-paid, lower-status jobs. While 90 per cent of nurses are
female, only 25 per cent of doctors are. Also, the majority of cleaners and kitchen staff
are women. Black women tend to be in the lowest-paid, lowest-status jobs. Thus there
is horizontal and vertical occupational segregation in the health service. The majority
of doctors are men in Western medicine and the occupation is gender-segregated and
gender-stratified (see Chapter 9), with male doctors tending to specialise in the more
prestigious areas (Lorber and Moore, 2002).
Women are also the major providers of unpaid health care in the home. Even
excluding those caring for dependent children, about 75 per cent of adults caring
for an elderly or disabled relative in the home are women (see Arber and Ginn, 1991).
Much health education is directed at women, who are assumed to care for other
relatives in the household. Health visiting was developed in the early part of this century
specifically as a way of educating mothers in how to look after their babies and young
children. Girls’ education at school has been seen as part of the process of training them
for motherhood. Mothers have been blamed for the poor health of their husbands and
children, and maternal education has been seen as a way of improving the nation’s
health. Often the poor material and economic circumstances under which women are
caring for their families have been ignored and the blame for the poor health of children
has been placed on the ignorance of mothers rather than on poverty.

Women as healers, men as professionals

Feminists have rediscovered the historical role of women as healers, showing that
until the eighteenth century healing was mainly women’s work, but that since then
men have come to play a dominant role in medicine. However, long before this men
had tried to prevent women practising medicine, and from the eighteenth century they
challenged their right to practise midwifery autonomously.
While there is evidence that women practised medicine in medieval Europe
(Verslusyen, 1980), a law was passed in England in 1421 preventing this practice.
Pressure for this law came from male doctors, and in this they were supported by the
Christian belief that women were inferior and had an evil nature (Daly, 1978). However,
health care given by women, as today, extended far beyond professional work. Women
cared for the sick members of their families and community and played a central role
in childbirth, which until the seventeenth century was seen as the exclusive concern
of women. Women learned about helping the sick and assisting women in childbirth
from other women in the community who had acquired the necessary skills and
expertise. Thus, while women were barred from formal institutions of learning, they
learned from each other (Ehrenreich and English, 1979). Indeed, the poor had little
access to formal medical care until the nineteenth century, with the growth of the
voluntary hospitals, and the available evidence suggests that women continued to rely
on informal knowledge, and on each other, in areas such as birth control and abortion
until well into the twentieth century.

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A key question that has concerned feminists is how men came to usurp women’s
traditional role as healers. It seems unlikely that this happened because men’s skills
and knowledge were superior, as there is little evidence that qualified doctors had
effective treatments to apply before this century, although the claims made by male
medical men that they had superior skills may have been believed by some patients.
Also, the ability to afford the high fees charged by physicians may have been a way of
achieving and maintaining a high status in middle-class society.
Ehrenreich and English (1979) have suggested a link between the campaigns
against witches that occurred in Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth
centuries and the suppression of female healing. They argue that women healers were
singled out to be executed as witches and that thousands of women peasant healers
were seen as part of a subversive social movement threatening the (male) authority
of Church, Crown, the aristocracy and the few university-trained physicians. However,
there is no clear evidence that all or even most women healers were regarded as
witches during this period, and indeed there is considerable evidence that unqualified
women healers continued to practise in England after the witch-hunts had ceased.
Other feminists have argued that the changes that accompanied the industrial
revolution were a major factor in men achieving control and dominance in medical
practice. Alice Clark (1982 [1919]) argued that the displacement of women healers by
qualified medical guilds (the precursors of the Royal Colleges) was part of the process
whereby skilled workers in general moved out of the family into the marketplace and
excluded the unskilled and unqualified from practice. Margaret Verslusyen (1980)
also points to the development of hospitals. Before the eighteenth century medical
men treated only the wealthy, in their own homes. By the end of the eighteenth century
hospitals had begun to be built in the growing towns. These hospitals were built with
charitable money donated by the wealthy for the exclusive use of working-class
patients. In them, medical men began to treat ‘charity’ patients who were their ‘inferiors’.
Doctors were therefore able to develop and test new ideas on these patients. At the
same time the growth of the middle class meant that there was an increase in the num-
ber of fee-paying patients for doctors to treat at home. The growth in clientele and
the claims to new scientific knowledge provided a base from which qualified doctors
pressed for the banning of their unqualified female rivals.
Anne Witz’s (1992) neo-Weberian analysis has argued that the ways in which
medical men struggled to establish and sustain a sexually segregated division of labour
provides an example of social closure and demarcation (and that they were aided
in applying this closure by the state) – closure in that women were excluded from
practising medicine, and demarcation in that doctors defined what was medical work,
and therefore the preserve of medical men, and what was ancillary and could be carried
out by female nurses and midwives. In 1858 the Medical Act established the exclusive
male prerogative. The Act defined a person who could practise medicine as one who
was a qualified medical practitioner by virtue of possessing a British university degree
or a licentiate membership or fellowship of one of the medical corporations. The
Act did not exclude women in itself, but women were not allowed in practice to go
to universities or become members of medical corporations.
The exclusion of women from medical practice was challenged by women who
conducted a protracted struggle to gain admittance to the medical profession. The first

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qualified female medical practitioner to practise in Britain was Elizabeth Blackwell,

who qualified at a US medical school in 1849. Elizabeth Garrett (Anderson) qualified
in 1865 with the Society of Apothecaries, the only medical corporation that did not
explicitly exclude women. However, the Society immediately changed its rules so that
the same could not happen again.
Women campaigned to be allowed to qualify as doctors on the basis of equal
rights claims – a common demand of feminists in the nineteenth century and based
on the dominant liberal political philosophy. Women also argued that women and
children should have the right to be treated by a woman doctor. They had to gain the
support of male Members of Parliament to introduce legislation. In 1875 an ‘Enabling
Bill’ was passed, permitting universities and medical corporations to admit women,
but this did not force them to do so. (In 1899 an Act of Parliament removed all the
remaining legal barriers to women training as doctors, so that they had in theory to
be admitted to training, but the de facto barriers remained.) In the late 1870s, Sophia
Jex-Blake and other women established the London School of Medicine for Women.
However, even when women were admitted to medical training and became quali-
fied medical practitioners, they tended to confine their practice almost exclusively
to women and children, working in hospitals or in dispensaries they established
themselves, or as medical missionaries.
While women won the right to train as doctors and practise medicine, it continued
to be a male-dominated profession. There has been a steady increase in the number
of women training as doctors and in the proportion of female to male medical students;
nevertheless the high-status jobs continue to go to men (see Chapter 9). Female general
practitioners argue that they are frequently expected to look after women and children,
yet they want to deal with the full range of patients and medical complaints dealt with
by general practitioners.

Nurses, midwives and medical men

A key feature of health care is the dominance and control that doctors exercise over
paramedical workers, including midwives and nurses, a position that is sustained
through state support (Johnson, 1972; Larkin, 1983). Nursing was established as a
profession supplementary to medicine (Gamarnikow, 1978), and the Midwifery Act
of 1903, which required that only registered midwives be permitted to practise, placed
them finally under medical control. Jeff Hearn (1982) has argued that the process of
professionalisation is a process of male assumption of control over female tasks. Thus
as male doctors acquire the status of a profession they not only exclude female healers
from practising but gain control over other female workers, who take on a subordinate
role in the medical division of labour.
Women healers retained control over childbirth for a much longer period than they
did over healing generally, but even in midwifery they began from the 1660s to have
their dominant role challenged by male midwives (obstetricians). It is possible that the
origins of male midwifery relate to the invention of the obstetric forceps, or more
simply that it was just another example of males attempting to take over a field pre-
viously dominated by females. However, there was opposition to male midwifery
(1) from the general public, who thought it indecent, (2) from female midwives because

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of the threat to their livelihood, and (3) from established medical men who saw
midwifery as degrading women’s work and not part of medicine at all.
The invention of the obstetric forceps was certainly an important ‘breakthrough’;
prior to their invention, an obstetric delay (slow birth) resulted in the death of the
mother and/or the child. The use of them was restricted to barber-surgeons and there-
fore to men, and the number of cases helped was small and the risk of infection and
death as a result of their use was enormous. The growth of the lying-in hospitals where
male midwives delivered women also played a role in raising the status of male
midwifery, especially as women were excluded from the scientific knowledge they
claimed to have. Probably more important was the fact that from the seventeenth
century a fashion gradually developed for the wealthy to use male midwives, giving
support to the male midwives’ claim that their knowledge was superior to that of female
midwives. This was supported by the argument that only the male midwives could
do surgery if complications should arise.
It was in the late nineteenth century that medical doctors accepted that mid-
wifery should be undertaken and controlled by men. During the nineteenth century the
Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons both argued against doctors’ involvement
in midwifery, but by 1850 lectures in midwifery were being given in British medical
schools and by 1866 proficiency in it was necessary for qualification as a medi-
cal practitioner. The claim by doctors to control childbirth was made on the basis that
medical men had superior knowledge. By 1880:

a great advance had been made in the science and art of midwifery. This was due
chiefly to the introduction of male practitioners, many of whom were men of
learning and devoted to anatomy, the groundwork of obstetrics.
(Spencer, 1927, p. 175)

This claim was not justified on medical grounds. In the nineteenth century a quarter
of women giving birth in hospital died of puerperal fever, and those delivered at home
were more likely to be infected if they were attended by a male doctor rather than
a female midwife. (Puerperal fever is an infection transmitted by doctors from other
areas, and especially from dead bodies, to women in childbirth.) Nevertheless medi-
cal men were determined to gain control of midwifery and to determine the role of
female midwives – to establish the division of labour between themselves and female
midwives. Thus they set out to demarcate what areas were rightfully theirs at the same
time as defending the medical prerogative. The struggle between medical men and
female midwives since the seventeenth century had begun to establish a distinction
between assistance at childbirth and intervention in childbirth – one between normal
and abnormal childbirth. Only male doctors (qualified medical practitioners) were
allowed to use forceps and to intervene surgically.
The Midwifery Registration Act of 1903 resulted in the registration and education
of midwives coming under the control of medical men, and a doctor had to be called
in if anything went wrong with a delivery. A major reason why doctors did not usurp
the role of midwives was that they realised that there was no way in which they could
meet the demand – in the late nineteenth century, seven out of every nine births were
attended by female midwives. Also, many doctors did not want to attend poor women.

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Doctors thus deskilled midwives, and while female midwives continued to attend poor
women in childbirth, doctors attended the wealthy. Medical domination of childbirth
continues in the early twenty-first century, and indeed it could be argued that it has
increased, because the majority of births are in hospital under the (official) control of
a consultant, and because of the increased use of medical technology. While most
women are actually delivered by a (female) midwife, the ultimate control remains in
the hands of the (generally male) obstetrician.
Nurses, too, play a subordinate role in the medical division of labour. Nursing has
always been and continues to be a predominantly female province. Most nursing is
of course done by women, as unpaid carers in the domestic sphere. However, nursing
in the public sphere is also predominantly a female occupation. While caring for the
sick was undertaken in a variety of institutions in the past, it was not until the middle
of the nineteenth century that nursing emerged as a separate occupation. Prior to that,
nursing in hospitals was seen as a form of domestic work that required little specific
training and was usually undertaken by married women, doing little different for their
patients than they did for their families at home. The demarcation between nurses
and patients was blurred – able-bodied convalescent patients were expected to help
the nurses with the domestic work on the wards. Florence Nightingale suggested that
in the mid-nineteenth century nursing was mainly done by those ‘who were too old,
too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too sordid or too bad to do anything else’ (quoted in
Abel-Smith, 1960, p. 53). The argument that nurses needed training and the recognition
by doctors that bedside medicine meant that patients needed monitoring developed
before Florence Nightingale’s reforms. However, she did attempt to develop nursing
as a profession and to recruit middle-class women, who received a training. These
reforms took place in the voluntary hospitals, and it was not until late in the nineteenth
century that nurses in workhouse hospitals were trained.
While Florence Nightingale recognised the need for trained nurses, she trained
them in obedience, so that in the division of labour between nurses and doctors, nurses
were seen and saw themselves as the subordinates of doctors and as under medical
control. Nor did Nightingale challenge the link between womanhood and nursing. Eve
Gamarnikow (1978) has pointed out that in the Nightingale model nurses were still
responsible for the cleaning of the wards as well as the care of the patients. She suggests
that the relationship between doctor and nurse paralleled the relationship between
the Victorian husband and wife in the family. The nurse looked after the physical and
emotional environment, while the doctor decided what the really important work was
and how it should be done. Thus the good nurse was the good mother, concerned
with caring for her patients (family).
During the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, while nurses no longer see
themselves as handmaidens of doctors, they have remained trapped in their status as
subordinate to doctors; their role is to care while that of doctors is to cure. In 1918 the
Nursing Register was introduced, and the Nurses Act 1943 established state-enrolled
nurses as well as state-registered ones, but neither kind is recognised as independent
practitioners. Ann Oakley (1984b) confessed:

In a fifteen-year career as a sociologist studying medical services, I confess that

I have been particularly blind to the contribution made by nurses to health care.

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Indeed, over a period of some months spent observing in a large London hospital
I hardly noticed nurses at all. I took their presence for granted (much as, I imagine,
the doctors and patients did).
(Oakley, 1984b, p. 24)

Nursing in the early twenty-first century is seen predominantly as a lowly paid

female occupation, but there are clear ethnic and class divisions in nursing. The greater
emphasis on community care for frail elderly people has also resulted in home helps
taking on personal care work, creating even greater divisions between women who
perform paid caring work and those who supervise it (Abbott, 1995). Working-class
women and women from ethnic minorities are concentrated in the assistant grades
and white middle-class women in the registered grade in the prestigious teaching
hospitals. Furthermore, more men are entering nursing, and the new managerial
structures introduced in the 1970s have resulted in a disproportionately large number
of men appointed to management posts (Evans, 2004). Although men have been able
to become general nurses only since 1943, they have increasingly moved into senior
posts in what was once, as far as the nursing of physical illness was concerned, an
all-woman and woman-managed occupation. (The situation is much the same in other
Western countries – see e.g. Lorber and Moore, 2002. Interestingly, medicine is a
female-dominated occupation in Russia – but it is also poorly remunerated and carries
low status.)

Women, motherhood and ‘informal’ care

Women are seen as primarily responsible for maintaining the health of their families,
and as informal, unpaid carers they play a major role in caring for the sick, the disabled,
the elderly and other dependent groups. Hilary Graham (1987) argues that women are
providers of informal health care in the domestic economy and that this role is shaped
by the sexual division of labour such that men are seen as providers and women as
carers, and by the spatial division of labour, where the local community is seen as the
setting for routine medical care and centrally located institutions of medicine for the
application of specialist medical skills. Graham suggests that there are three aspects
to women’s health work:

• providing for health;

• teaching for health; and
• mediating professional help in times of crisis.

Thus she argues that much routine domestic labour and caring is about health
maintenance, while women are seen as responsible for the health education of their
children and are generally the ones who decide whether it is necessary to consult a
doctor.
The welfare state was built on the assumption that the traditional nuclear family
was the norm and that women would care and provide for the members of this
family. As is pointed out in Chapter 6, more recent policies of community care are built

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on the assumption that women are prepared to care for dependent members of their
families (including the wider, extended family). Health promotion campaigns are also
often directed at women, assuming that it is their role to care for and look after the
health of their men and children.
Women are also blamed when their families are seen as unhealthy. They are seen
as responsible for bringing up healthy children and maintaining the health of their men
for the nation. Health visitors, social workers and other professional state employees
‘police’ the family to ensure that women are carrying out their task adequately. Since
the early twentieth century motherhood has been a medical domain not just in terms
of ante-natal care and delivery, but in terms of bringing up healthy children. When in
the early twentieth century considerable concern was expressed about the poor health
of the working class, made visible in public by the poor state of men volunteering
to enlist in the army at the time of the Boer War, the blame was placed on negligent
mothers. It was argued that women should put caring for their families first, should give
up paid employment and be trained in domestic skills and childcare. The government
advocated the employment by local authorities of trained health visitors under the
control of the district medical officers, building on the voluntary movement that had
developed in the nineteenth century which visited the houses of working-class families
with young children. Scant attention was paid to the poverty and appalling conditions
in which working-class women were struggling to bring up their children and the
poor health experienced by most of these women. The available evidence suggests
that, then as now, women put the needs and demands of their families first and gave
little consideration to their own needs.
While it is rarely given official recognition, and the tendency is to see paid health
workers as the primary providers of health care, women provide most health care within
the confines of the family. The unpaid, rarely recognised health care work of women
in the domestic sphere is extensive. The welfare state is built on the assumption that
women will perform this work and that women naturally want to care for their partners
and their children.
While feminists are correct in arguing that male medical men have usurped
women’s role as healers in the public sphere, women continue to have the major role
in the private sphere. However, women are under medical dominance and control in
the medical division of labour, whether they are paid workers in the public sphere or
unpaid workers in the domestic one.

Conclusions

Women play a dominant role in health care systems, both as providers of care and as
patients. Women have the major responsibility, in the domestic sphere, for providing
informal health care for husbands, children and other dependents. Within the formal
health care system women predominate, but they are concentrated in the least
prestigious and powerful jobs – as nurses, junior doctors, care assistants and domestics.
Black women are found disproportionately in the least prestigious jobs – that is, those
that are poorly paid, often part-time, and insecure. Medical knowledge has played a
powerful role in constructing popular images of women as ‘inferior’ to men and as
controlled by their bodies.

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SUMMARY

1 Women are some of the main workers in the health services. The
medical services are highly segregated by gender, with employment
such as nursing associated with feminine roles – caring, nurturing,
domestic work, and so on being associated with female workers
while high-status posts associated with specific expertise such as
consultancies are associated with male professionals.
2 Women are the main consumers of health services because:
• they are responsible for the health of the family and are likely
to see the doctor on the family’s behalf;
• women are themselves more likely to suffer from a variety of
ailments;
• women live longer than men.
3 Western medicine is defined according to masculine models of health
and illness. It has not been concerned with the well-being of the
individual but rather with curing disease.
4 Women are more likely to be the informal carers and the ones respon-
sible for health care outside of the formal services – for example,
treating the illnesses of family members.

FURTHER READING

Annandale, E. and Hunt, K. (eds) (2000) Gender Inequalities in Health. Buckingham: Open
University Press. This edited collection is extremely comprehensive and reflects on recent
feminist work on gender inequalities in health and health care. It also develops an agenda for
future research. It incorporates contributions from a range of perspectives, and from academics
who have been central to the development of a gendered analysis of health.
Barry, A-M. and Yuill, C. (2002) Understanding Health: A Sociological Introduction. London: Sage.
This book is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the sociology of health and illness.
It develops a critique of the ‘medical model’ and explores the social context of health and health
care, the role of the health care professions, and also organisational constraints on health care
delivery. Each chapter considers a range of thematic issues and theoretical debates in relation
to gender and other aspects of identity and inequality.
Doyal, L. (ed.) (1998) Women and Health Services: An Agenda for Change. Buckingham: Open
University Press. This practice-oriented book addresses gender inequalities in health care,
focusing on the extent to which women’s health concerns have moved up the health service
agenda in recent years. Its focus is primarily on Britain, however.

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 CHAPTER EIGHT

Sexuality

Sexuality is generally taken to refer to the social experience and expression of physical
bodily desires, real or imagined, by or for others or for oneself. It encompasses erotic
desires, identities and practices. Seemingly one of the most private, intimate aspects
of our lives, sociologists have argued that sexuality is fundamentally social and political.
This is because sexuality is experienced and expressed within relations of power and
exchange and what we think of as sexual varies historically and culturally as well as
in different social contexts. Sociologists have therefore argued that no human sexual
behaviour or practice can be divorced from the social and political circumstances in
which it takes place, and the social relations within which it is embedded. This means
that even individual sex acts (such as masturbation or other forms of auto-eroticism)
are social acts because the way in which we think about and make sense of them is
shaped by a range of social values, attitudes, norms and sanctions. Yet sexuality
remains something of a neglected topic in sociology when compared to say social
class or the mass media, brought onto the sociological agenda only relatively recently.
Largely as a result of the contribution of feminist sociologists and political activists
sexuality has now begun to emerge as a legitimate focus of sociological concern.
Indeed, that New Right movements in many Western societies have mobilised
considerable political energies through their emphasis on the sanctity of the family,
hostility to gay and lesbian sexuality and to ‘sexual deviance’ of various kinds is, as Jeff
Weeks (1991, p. 12) has noted, something of a ‘back-handed compliment to the success
of feminism’.
Sexuality has been one of the main concerns of feminist theory and politics
not least because feminists regard men’s control of women’s sexuality as one of the
key mechanisms through which patriarchy is maintained. Feminists have drawn
attention to the social control of women’s sexuality through religious, state and medical
regulatory practices. In particular, feminists have emphasised the role of sexuality in
reinforcing patriarchal power relations, highlighting issues such as pornography, sexual
violence, clitoridectomy, prostitution and ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich, 1980)
– the social compulsion to be heterosexual. Feminists have also made a significant
contribution to theorising sexuality and the sexual body. They have also highlighted
the relative neglect of issues of sexual identity in the social model of disability (Lloyd,
2001). Many have argued that the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ has merely been
a means of increasing and legitimating a male right of sexual access to women. Others
have highlighted, however, the ways in which sexuality can be a means of challenging

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and resisting women’s oppression. Feminist contributions have also drawn attention
to the ways in which so-called scientific perspectives (including those developed by
social scientists) have served to perpetuate women’s sexual oppression.
Broadly speaking, social scientific approaches have tended to conceptualise
sexuality in one of two ways: as either a biological or psychological essence and there-
fore as pre-social, or as a social construct – a product of the meanings attributed
to certain forms of social and physical interaction. Both approaches are premised on
the conviction that sexuality has a biological, psychological or social essence; that
is, that sexuality constitutes a relatively stable aspect of our biology, psyche or social
identity. More recently, and particularly since the influence of postmodernism and
poststructuralist ideas, sexuality has come to be regarded as a ‘performative’ aspect
of identity devoid of biological or social essence, but rather constantly enacted and
negotiated within the context of power relations and language.

Essentialist perspectives on sexuality

Essentialist perspectives on sexuality are based on the view that sexuality is a biological
or psychological essence. Until relatively recently, they have tended to dominate social
scientific, as well as legal, moral, religious and medical, discourse on sexuality and
sexual relations. A pre-social or essentialist theory of sexuality is grounded in four
basic assumptions. These are that sexuality:

• is a basic human drive or force that exists prior to social life;

• is determined by the biological or psychological make-up of human beings;
• resides or exists within the human body; and
• functions throughout our lives essentially as a ‘property’ of the individual.

From this perspective, human beings are deemed to have a fixed, stable and bio-
logically or psychologically determined sexual identity. It has subsequently become
enshrined in five basic assumptions underpinning the legal definition of sexual
intercourse in most Western societies:

• sex is natural;
• what is natural is heterosexual;
• genital sex is primary and determining;
• ‘true’ sexual intercourse is phallocentric; and
• sex is something that ideally takes place within marriage, or at least in a long-term
relationship.

Such positivist approaches take for granted the social classification of certain kinds
of behaviour as sexual, and within that category certain forms as natural and normal,
while others are seen as unnatural or deviant. The concern has often been to explain
why sexually deviant behaviour occurs. Anti-positivist or social constructionist
approaches (that we consider below) are concerned by contrast to illuminate the socio-
historical processes through which certain kinds of sexuality come to be constructed
(as normal and natural) and to explore the power relations involved.

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In the twentieth century, at least in Western societies, psychoanalytic theories of

sexuality gradually became more influential than biological ones. Associated most
notably with the work of Sigmund Freud, the conception of sexuality as a basic human
drive came to underpin the development, in the early twentieth century, of sexology
– the ‘science’ of sex. In a simplified form, psychoanalytic approaches emphasise that
adult identity, including sexuality, is largely determined by childhood experience. Thus,
what are seen as abnormal forms of sexual behaviour are thought to be the result of
experiences in early childhood, or of arrested libidinal development. Thus, lesbianism
is characterised in terms of ‘mother fixation’, and gay men are seen as coming from
homes in which the mother was a strong influence whilst the father was a submissive
or absent figure. Many aspects of these theories have a strong ‘common-sense’ appeal,
and are reflected in political debates and social policies concerning, for instance, single
parenthood or fostering and adoption by gay and lesbian couples.
Sociologists have made a number of critical points about biological and psycho-
analytic theories of sexuality. First, the extent to which there is a biological basis
to sexuality remains open to debate. Second, research by social psychologists has
found no common factor in the upbringing of homosexuals different from that of
heterosexuals, nor any consistent personality differences between the two groups.
Third, positivist approaches tend to assume that adult sexuality is fixed and stable,
and easily categorised: that people are either homosexual or heterosexual (or bisexual).
Sexology evolved as a body of specialist knowledge collated and disseminated
by ‘experts’ such as Havelock Ellis and Alfred Kinsey, as well as William Masters
and Virginia Johnson who proclaimed themselves to be devoted to establishing
scientific proof of what is normal and natural in terms of sexual identity and behav-
iour. Though, on the one hand, it could be argued that sexology was potentially a
radical social movement that freed sexuality from its close association with religious
and moral doctrine, focusing instead on the ‘scientific’ study of sexuality (religious
moralism and authoritarian codes were deemed to be dissolved in the light of scien-
tific reason), on the other hand, sexology lent scientific credibility to essentialist and,
feminists have argued, highly patriarchal, definitions of ‘normal’ sexuality. ‘Normal’
sexuality came to be defined as heterosexual (penetrative), monogamous and
procreative (a development that had important legal implications). Sexology tended
to be highly gendered, and defined women largely as sexually passive and men as
naturally sexually active, with a high sex drive. Feminists have argued that this
‘scientific’ insight served to reinforce and perpetuate a sexual double standard between
men and women.
During the decades after the First World War in Britain, sex and the nature of
male and female sexual desire was being opened up to scientific scrutiny by doctors,
sexologists, psychologists and members of other, relatively new professions, such
as psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Their ideas were also being popularised through
the publication of marriage manuals and advice literature by a number of authors,
of whom perhaps the most influential was Marie Stopes. Her most famous book
Married Love was first published in 1918 and by 1930 has been through eighteen
editions (seven in its first year), sold 690,000 copies and had been translated into ten
languages. The book’s successors included Wise Parenthood, Radiant Motherhood and
Enduring Passions.

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Stopes was unequivocal in her message that both men and women should marry
as early as possible. She painted a highly idealised picture of lifelong sexually satisfying
unions between loving partners – a goal which, she believed, was achievable by every
‘normal’ person. While the idealisation of marriage was not in itself new, Stopes’s
emphasis on the importance of sexual satisfaction not only for men but also for women,
and on mutual pleasure and marital harmony, was something of a revelation in the
public imagination. It has been argued by feminists such as Susan Kingsley Kent (1993)
that the advice given by Stopes and others in the inter-war years marks a shift in gender
relations, towards an unprecedented emphasis on mutual sexual pleasure for men and
women. Where her advice is particularly problematic in feminist terms is in Stopes’s
insistence that sexual satisfaction was normal, beneficial and indeed essential for
married men and women, while at the same time denying its benefits to single people.
Yet it is also clear why she adopted this position. Given that her principal object was
to promote birth control she had to protect herself against accustations (from members
of the Church for instance) that her work was licensing immorality and vice. As June
Rose (1992) notes, Married Love would surely have been banned if there had been any
explicit suggestion that single people might benefit from its contents. That sex outside
of marriage was so inherently problematic for Stopes illustrates both the hegemonic
position marriage occupied in the early part of the twentieth century, as well as the
strain this institution was under. However, it was not until the pill was made widely
available and acts decriminalising abortion and homosexuality were passed in the
late 1960s that the connections between sex and marriage began to lose their hege-
monic grip (see Chapter 5). Yet even today, as the popularity of TV shows such as Men
Behaving Badly in the UK, and the best-selling novel and film Bridget Jones’s Diary
testify, the sexual relationships of single men and women are still seen as problematic
set against an ever more illusory happily married norm.
Margaret Jackson (1987) has emphasised that the development of sexology meant
that those aspects of female sexuality and heterosexuality that feminists viewed as
social and political were reaffirmed as fundamentally natural, and by constructing a
‘scientific’ model on that basis, sexuality was effectively removed from the political
arena. Hence, by consigning sexuality to the sphere of the natural, the exclusive
preserve of the (largely male) scientist, sexologists ‘helped to protect it from feminist
challenge’ (p. 56). Jackson argues that a scientific model of sexuality has the effect of
universalising male sexual supremacy, so that:

Male sexuality has been universalized and now serves as the model of human
sexuality. Furthermore, by equating human sexual desire with a coital imperative,
i.e. a biological drive to copulate, ‘sex’ is ultimately reduced to a reproductive
function, with the obvious implication that the only really ‘natural’ form of sexual
relationship is heterosexual.
(Jackson, 1987, p. 73)

As she goes on to note, the word ‘impotent’ means powerless, and carries the
implication that a man who is unable to penetrate a woman is also unable to exercise
power over her; his penis is (or should be) a ‘tool’ of male power. The scientific model
of sexuality constructed by sexologists is therefore one which

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both reflects male supremacist values and promotes the interests of men by
defining sex in male terms and thus facilitating the sexual–political control of
women by men within the institution of heterosexuality and by means of specific
heterosexual practices.
(Jackson, 1987, p. 74)

The increasing sexualisation of Western women since the nineteenth century, and
other women before and subsequently, should not be seen as liberating, Jackson
concludes, but rather as an attempt to eroticise women’s oppression, one legitimated
by discourses of science and modernity, and particularly by what has been described
as ‘modernist sexuality’.

Modernist sexuality

Sociologist Gail Hawkes (1996) has argued that a ‘modernist sexuality’ underpinned
sexology, and a much broader series of social processes involving the ‘modernization’
of sexuality. For Hawkes, modernist sexuality was shaped largely by three factors:

1 the association of sexuality with ‘nature’;

2 the ‘scientific’ classification of sexual subjectivities, or the emergence of ‘sexual
types’; and
3 the primacy of heterosexuality.

A persistent presence in the construction of healthy, moral and natural sexuality

was (and remains, sociologists have argued), the privileging of heterosexuality. As a
consequence of this ‘modernization’ process, Hawkes argues,

those manifestations of desire which were deemed to have negative consequences

for the maintenance of the patriarchal bourgeois hegemony – women’s sexual
autonomy, same-sex desire, expressions of youthful sexuality and auto-eroticism
– were marginalized and even outlawed.
(Hawkes, 1996, p. 3)

This effectively meant that the central position of heterosexuality was both retained
and strengthened as ‘what was once ordained by God was affirmed by the men of
science’ (p. 72). In this respect, sexological research also lent scientific credibility to
pre-modern, largely religious or superstitious links between gender and sexuality,
providing ‘evidence’ of women’s innate sexual passivity and men’s naturally higher sex
drive. As Holland et al. have put it,

In medical and common-sense thought, men have uncontrollable sexual urges

which are not shared by women. ‘Normal sex’ then entails active men satisfying
passive women in the satisfaction of their own ‘natural’ desires. Women’s sexuality
is defined as finding fulfillment in meeting men’s needs.
(Holland et al., 1994, p. 29)

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Feminists have argued that much of the sexological research carried out in the
early to mid-twentieth century was far from scientific, but rather represented patri-
archal interests in the production of ‘evidence’ that served to give credibility to the
maintenance of a sexual double standard, to the sexual objectification of women and
to the marginalisation of gay, lesbian and celibate sexualities (Jackson, 1987). Sheila
Jeffreys (1985) has argued that the category ‘lesbian’ was introduced in the late
nineteenth century in order to control and marginalise both sexual and social intimacy
between women.
An essentialist perspective has also shaped our thinking about the relationship
between sexuality, race and class. In lending ‘scientific’ credibility to the idea that
working-class and Black people are sexually rampant and immoral, for instance, and
less able to control their sexual ‘urges’. The influence of racism adds another dimension
to the way in which Black and Asian women’s sexuality has been understood in
essentialist terms. Black women, particularly African and African–Caribbean women
have been seen in racist ideology as ‘bursting’ with an uncontrollable and insatiable
sexuality, rendering them in need of ‘civilization’ by white men (hooks, 1992). Asian
women have simultaneously been seen as passive victims, and as exotic and sexual
beings. Black women’s sexuality has often been constructed in terms of their ‘nature’
therefore, involving, as Jean Carabine (1992) has put it, normative values about
sexuality that are also replicated and reasserted in social policies through ideologies
of racism, heterosexuality, familialism and motherhood.
It has to be said then that most of our contemporary understanding of sexuality
comes from the work of biologists, medical researchers and sexologists, rather than
sociologists, who have tended to focus on hormones, brain structures, drives and
instincts. Hence, most of the research on sexuality has been concerned with laying
out the biological foundations of sexuality. As Macionis and Plummer (2002, p. 306)
note, this is also true of our common-sense understanding, as most people tend
to assume that sex is just ‘natural’. But, recall from Chapter 1, sociologists tend to
challenge common-sense assumptions and taken-for-granted views of the social world,
and focus instead on the ways in which what might appear to be natural and pre-
social is actually socially constructed and shaped by power relations. Sociologists
therefore link sexuality to broader patterns of social stratification and inequality (see
Chapter 3).

Sociological perspectives on sexuality

More sociological approaches to sexuality began to develop in the 1960s and tended
to shift away from the conceptualisation of sexuality as a biological or psychological
essence, focusing instead on the ways in which sexuality is socially constructed
(Gagnon and Simon, 1973; Caplan, 1987; Weeks, 1991). William Simon and John
Gagnon were arguably the founders of what has become known as the social
constructionist approach to sexuality. Both worked at the Kinsey Institute for Sexual
Behaviour in the 1960s, and both felt the need to turn to more sociological theories
to explain the findings of their empirical research. Drawing on a drama metaphor,
they developed the idea of a sexual script to understand the social rules, regulations

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and roles that serve as a guide to sexual behaviour. They outline three major forms of
sexual script:

1 Personal scripts are those in our heads – telling us, for instance, what turns us on.
2 Interactive scripts are those which emerge from sexual relations – between partners
or groups, for instance, and which tell us what role to play.
3 Historical–cultural scripts are those which exist in culture and society, and which tell
us what is expected of us sexually in any given society.

Jeff Weeks (1986) provides a historical account of the social construction of

sexuality in Western societies, identifying three key moments in the evolution of the
West’s preoccupation with sexual orientation and, particularly, the stigmatisation
of homosexuality. The first, he argues, occurred in the first century AD which witnessed
a growing disapproval of the indulgence of sex purely for pleasure. The second was
in the twelfth century, which saw the triumph of the specifically Christian tradition
of sex and marriage, and the belief that the only morally acceptable form of sexual
relations was intercourse between a married couple for purposes of reproduction.
The third began in the eighteenth century, which produced the explicit construction
of heterosexual sex as ‘normal’ and the consequent categorisation of other forms
of sexuality as deviant or perverse (see also Hawkes, 1996).
Underpinning a social constructionist approach is the idea that sexuality is not
a fixed entity but rather a complex, interactive aspect of identity and experience, one
shaped largely by interaction between individuals and the wider social, economic, and
political context. This social constructionist approach has been concerned primarily
with the ways in which what we deem to be ‘sexual’ is not a pre-social, biological
essence but rather an, albeit relatively stable, product of the shared meanings attributed
to certain forms of behaviour. Professional norms governing the de-sexualisation of
gynaecological examinations, for instance, are indicative of the ways in which sexu-
ality is socially constructed through the meanings that come to be associated with
particular modes of social interaction. This approach rejects then, the essentialist
contention that sexuality is a pre-social given, emphasising instead its social con-
struction. This perspective also highlights the extent to which ‘we . . . cannot think
about sexuality without taking into account gender’ (Weeks, 1986, p. 45).
What sociological perspectives also tend to emphasise is that all cultures have
mechanisms to organise sexuality, and no society allows a total ‘free for all’. As
Macionis and Plummer (2002, p. 307) put it, ‘human sexualities are patterned through
law, religion and a range of social institutions such as kinship and family systems
and economic and social organisation’. Nevertheless, there is considerable variation
in the nature and extent of these controls: some religions such as Islam, for instance,
seek to regulate sexuality very strictly. According to the classical Hanafi school of
Islamic jurisprudence, for example, a wife may only be granted a divorce on grounds
of her husband’s impotence (Therborn, 2004).
In her account of women’s sexuality and social policy, Jean Carabine (1992)
emphasised the role of social policy in perpetuating a heterosexual norm. She argues
that heterosexuality is a central ideological theme running through social policy
in Western societies and intermeshing with ideologies of the family and motherhood.

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Other feminist and pro-feminist sociologists have linked heterosexual hegemony to

the concept of citizenship, arguing that gay men and lesbian women and other sexual
‘minorities’ have historically been denied the citizenship status and rights accorded
particularly to heterosexual men (Evans, 1993; Richardson, 1998).
Closely linked to the idea that sexuality is socially constructed according to
a system of rules and regulations is the concept of a ‘hierarchy of sex’. Developed
by feminist sociologist Gayle Rubin (1984) the concept of a sexual hierarchy captures
the extent to which societies come to classify sexuality according to a system of strati-
fication so that some forms are valued (and hence, come to be located in what she
calls our ideational ‘comfort zones’) while others are not. Rubin devised this hierarchy
in the early 1980s and it is interesting to consider some of the ways in which it might
have changed since then (see Table 8.1).

Table 8.1 Rubin’s hierarchy of sex

‘Good’ sex Areas of contest ‘Bad’ sex

Normal Unmarried heterosexual Abnormal

couples
Natural Promiscuous heterosexuals Unnatural
Healthy Masturbation Sick
Holy Long-term, stable lesbian Sinful
and gay couples
Heterosexual Promiscuous gay men ‘Way out’
Married Transvestites
Monogamous Transsexuals
Reproductive Fetishists/SM
At home Commercial sex
Cross-generational

Source: Rubin, 1984.

What sociological approaches also emphasise is not only the social construction
of sexuality, but the social context of its enactment. As Macionis and Plummer have
put it,

We often tend to use sex for social ends, not just biological goals such as
reproduction. Far from sex being just biological, we come to use it for many
reasons: as an expression of love, as a means to establish bonding, as a way
of being clear about our manliness or womanliness, or indeed our maturity. It can
be used to show our aggression (as in rape) or to fill up our boredom or as a kind
of hobby. It can be used as play, as performance, as power and as a form of work.
(Macionis and Plummer, 2002, p. 309)

What both essentialist and sociological perspectives on sexuality share in common,

nevertheless, is the conviction that sexuality is a relatively stable social identity,
one maintained in a (biologically or socially) constant and continuous way throughout

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our lives, through either a (biological/psychological) developmental process or a

process of socialisation and stratification through which we are deemed to acquire a
relatively stable, ‘true’ sexual identity. Both approaches, feminists have argued, also
tend to give insufficient attention to power relations in shaping, respectively, the social
expression or social construction of sexuality. A more specific concern with the
relationship between the social context of sexuality and power relations underpins a
third approach to sexuality that can be discerned in more recent sociological literature.

Postmodern sexualities

The contention that sexuality is merely a ‘performance’ devoid of biological or social

essence has been influenced largely by poststructuralism, and particularly the work of
Michel Foucault (1979) and its development in Judith Butler’s (1990) writing on gender
and sexuality. It has also been influenced by the empirical contention that we live in
a post- or late modern era in which social identity has come to be shaped by a
proliferation of lifestyle choices (Giddens, 1992). The idea that sexuality is performative
is based on the view that sexuality is an aspect of identity – a mode of being – that exists
only in the way it is presented and performed at any given moment; in other words, it
is thought to have no stable biological or social essence outside of its performance.
Postmodern perspectives tend to see society and social identity (including
sexuality) as the outcome of discourse. They emphasise that those with more power –
heterosexuals, for instance – are able to define those with less power – homosexuals
– as abnormal, unnatural, and so on. Discourses on homosexuality, for instance, have
tended to define it as an illness (it was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric
Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychological disorders, and
then only to relabel it as a ‘disturbance’ in sexual orientation). Similarly, gay men have
often been constructed in homophobic discourse as effeminate, over-sexed, promis-
cuous, disease-spreading child molesters, while lesbian women have been labelled as
butch, man-hating and aggressive. Many gay men and women do of course come to
perceive themselves in accordance with such discourses, and so internalise the nega-
tive labels applied to them. Research conducted by the London Lesbian and Gay
Research Project in 1984, based on a sample of 416 adults aged under 21 who identified
themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual, found that one in five had attempted suicide.
Equally, however, dominant discourses may be challenged and resisted. Indeed,
a variety of gay and lesbian resistance movements have developed in the West since
the late 1960s. In Britain, for instance, ‘Stonewall’ established in 1989, has pursued
a policy of working through legitimate political channels to bring about social and
legislative changes and to advocate the rights of gay and lesbian people, whilst
‘Outrage’, founded in 1990, has tended to favour direct action and a less conciliatory
approach. The gay and lesbian rights movement has also helped to shift academic
interest in homosexuality away from studying ‘causes and cures’ towards the study of
homophobia. Narrowly defined, this term refers to a fear of homosexuality, but is now
more commonly associated with hostility towards gay men and lesbian women.
As we noted in Chapter 2, Michel Foucault was interested in how specific ways
of thinking, talking and writing about the world – what he called discourses – structure

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our sense of self, our perception of the social world, and of other people. He argued
that subjectivity is the outcome of dominant discourses circulating in society at any
given time. These discourses shape the social meanings people attach to their own and
others’ identities and actions – what they ‘know’ to exist in the social world. Discourses
aren’t simply ways of knowing in Foucault’s terms, though, but define how the world
should be categorised and organised; in other words they do not merely describe to
us how the world is, but also shape our thinking about how it ought to be. In The History
of Sexuality, Foucault (1979) argued that measures to control populations introduced
in Western societies since the eighteenth century (what he calls ‘bio-power’) meant
that, inevitably, sexuality and sexual relations came under the influence of dominant
social and political discourses of the time. The discourse that consequently developed
around homosexuality, for instance, defined it as a perversion.
Although Foucault (1979) himself paid little attention to gender, and regarded
the regulation of women’s sexuality as only one aspect of its subjection to social
control, feminists have found much in his work useful, particularly the contention that
sexuality is socially constructed and reconstructed through discourse, and in complex
and often contradictory ways. Indeed Foucault’s rejection of a ‘repressive hypothesis’
– the contention that an essential sexuality has been contained and controlled
by various religious, social, moral and medical forces – in favour of an analysis which
focuses on the ways in which sexuality is constructed in and through power relations
has been seen by some feminists as politically liberating, allowing as it does for sexuality
to be reconstructed and negotiated on feminist rather than patriarchal terms.
For Butler (1990), far from constituting innate dispositions or relatively stable
social categories, sexualities are created and lived through their performance. Butler
(1990) illustrates this point with reference to the drag queen, deemed (by the audience)
to have a ‘true’ gender and sexual identity underneath his ‘act’. But she argues that
what is assumed to be the drag queen’s ‘true’ identity is as much of a performance
as that enacted in drag and contends that, in effect, we are all ‘on stage’ because there
is no true self beneath the various identities we perform in different contexts. This per-
spective emphasises that heterosexuality is not normal or natural, as many biological
essentialists and social constructionists might argue, but is merely one performance
amongst many possible alternatives. As Butler (1990, p. 31) put it, ‘gay is to straight
not as copy is to original, but as copy is to copy’. This contention poses two main
challenges to heterosexual hegemony. First, it exposes the mechanisms through
which heterosexuality is socially constructed as normal and natural, and second, it
severs ascribed connections between sex, gender and sexuality (Butler, 1990)
emphasising that heterosexuality is only naturalised as an ‘original’. As Meyer (1994,
pp. 2–3) puts it, ‘queer does not serve to label a new kind of sexual subject but . . .
instead a concept of self which is performative, improvisational, discontinuous, and
processual, constituted by repetitive and stylized acts’.
What has come to be known as queer theory, based on a reappropriation of the
derogatory term in homophobic discourse, has been particularly significant to the idea
that sexuality is performative, emphasising that although Western societies have
developed a range of crude categories to contain sexuality, these can never be all-
encompassing because of the diverse range of sexual practices, desires and identities
that exist. In a challenge to dominant classifications (of straight, gay, lesbian, and so

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on), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) proposes a range of sexual configurations and
categories, based on the following ideas:

• even identical genital acts can mean very different things to different people;
• some people spend a lot of time thinking about sex, others little;
• some people like to have sex a lot, others little or not at all;
• many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts
that they don’t do, or even that they don’t want to do;
• for some people the possibility of bad sex is aversive enough to make them avoid
sex all together, for others this isn’t the case;
• some people like spontaneous, unstructured sex, others like sex to be highly
scripted, others like sex to seem spontaneous when it is nonetheless totally
predictable;
• some people’s sexual orientation is shaped by auto-erotic pleasures, for others auto-
eroticism is secondary or non-existent;
• some people’s sexuality is firmly embedded within a sex–gender matrix, for others
it is not.

Characteristic of queer theory, Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ideas about sexual identifica-

tion suggest a mapping of sexuality that does not rely on established categories of
homo/hetero/bisexual but instead draws attention to the ways in which these sexual
identities are merely performances or roles.
This ‘performative’ perspective on sexuality, one inspired largely by post-
structuralism, is characterised then by a rejection of what is viewed as the essentialism
of those approaches considered above that conceptualise sexuality as either bio-
logically determined or socially constructed. Instead, a more postmodern approach
is premised on the view that the modernisation of sex (its so-called ‘liberation’
from the confines of religious and moral teaching, and its location within science)
outlined by Gail Hawkes (1996) effectively equates to its ‘naturalization’ and cate-
gorisation in a way that is far from liberatory (Foucault, 1979). The postmodernisation
of sex is understood, in William Simon’s (1996, p. 30) work for instance, as ‘the
de-naturalization of sex’ involving, in many societies, the dissolution of traditional
social structures, the ascendance of secularism over religion, and the relatively recent
separation of sexuality from procreation.
Sexuality in the post- or late modern era is understood in terms of a proliferation
of lifestyle choices, which are no longer perceived as expressions of an essential or
even relatively stable or consistent disposition. Developing the idea of a ‘sexual script’
(Gagnon and Simon, 1973), Simon (1996) suggests that contemporary sexualities
are best understood as dramas, and that heterosexuality constitutes a particular sexual
genre – a relatively formulaic performance. He argues that following the emergence
of a post-modern society, sexuality has become more fluid, fragmented and diffuse
than previously, largely due to the proliferation of lifestyle choices.
This approach involves a rejection of the credibility of so-called scientific studies
of sexuality. This perspective also rejects the idea that acquiring a sexual identity
is the result of successful completion of a developmental or socialisation process, one
that moves through certain key stages. Rather, postmodernists such as Plummer (1996,

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p. xv) have argued that in terms of contemporary experiences and identities, ‘a

supermarket of sexual possibilities pervades’. In this sense, one particular signifier of
a possible shift towards a post-modern, performative sexuality that is often cited is that
‘heterosexuality has ceased to be a fixed terrain’. Technological innovations in
contraception of course greatly facilitated a disassociation of sexuality and procreation.
As we noted in Chapter 7, the pill became available in the US in 1960, and in Europe
in 1964, quickly followed by IUDs which became available in the late 1960s.
As Therborn (2004) notes, more than anything else, the sexual revolution has
brought about a normalisation of long periods of pre-marital sex and a plurality of
sexual partners over a lifetime, in a statistical as well as (to a lesser extent, perhaps),
in a moral sense. Therborn’s (2004) account also emphasises, however, that the effects
of sexual revolution have been far from universal. The extreme rigidity and control
in South Asia and in West and North Africa, for instance, seems on the whole to
have loosened in recent decades, but changes in sexual norms as dramatic as those
in northwestern Europe and the US are hard to detect in other parts of the world,
he argues. Post-modern perspectives on sexuality are therefore influenced by the
idea that fixed points of reference that determined sexual norms and ethics during
the modern era – religious, scientific, heterosexual, monogamous (see Hawkes,
1996) – were radically challenged in many Western societies in the latter half of
the twentieth century, giving way to a proliferation of sexual choices and identities
(Giddens, 1992). Anthony Giddens in particular argues that late modernity has released
sexuality from the confines of a single (heterosexual) hegemony and replaced it with
‘sexual pluralism’ – a sexual identity defined and structured by individual lifestyle
choices and relative gender equality. This means, he contends, that behaviours
previously thought to be ‘perverse’ have become an acceptable part of sexual diversity
or what he calls ‘plastic sexuality’ – sexuality for pleasure rather than reproduction. The
latter is closely linked to his idea of the ‘pure relationship’ – sexual relationships
enhanced by more open communication and a greater degree of equality than
previous generations have experienced, and hence a broader range of emotional
and sexual experiences. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1998, p. 24, original
emphasis) has put it ‘in its postmodern rendition, sexual activity is focused narrowly
on its orgasmic effect; for all practical intents and purposes, postmodern sex is about
orgasm’.
However, as Plummer also notes, poststructuralist and post-modern approaches
to sexuality can ultimately be politically disabling not only because they under-
emphasise the material factors that constrain our sexual ‘performances’ or lifestyle
choices, but also because (like postmodernism more generally – see Chapter 2)
they tend to abandon the pursuit of progress towards sexual liberation or enlight-
enment entirely. They may also be misguided empirically; as the figures in Table
8.2 indicate, even in the UK many people still consider homosexual relations, sex
outside of marriage and sexual relations under the age of consent to be socially
unacceptable.
In its study of social attitudes towards sexual relations, Social Trends (1998) found,
perhaps not unsurprisingly, that younger people are more likely than older ones to
have tolerant attitudes towards same sex sexual relations. The survey found that almost
two-thirds of people aged 65 and over thought sexual relations between two adults of

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Table 8.2 Attitudes to sexual relations, 1998

1 2 3 4 5 Total
Always Mostly Sometimes Rarely Not at all Other %
wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong

A man and a woman 8 8 12 10 58 5 100

having sexual relations
before marriage
A married person having 52 29 13 1 2 4 100
sexual relations with
someone other than
their spouse
A boy and a girl having 56 24 11 3 3 3 100
sexual relations aged
under 16
Sexual relations between 39 12 11 8 23 8 100
two adults of the same
sex

Source: Social Trends 30, 1998.

Note: People aged 18 and over were asked whether they thought different types of sexual relations were wrong,
on a five-point scale: 1 = always wrong, 2 = mostly wrong, 3 = sometimes wrong, 4 = rarely wrong, 5 = not at all
wrong. ‘Other’ includes those who did not reply, those who replied ‘don’t know’, and those responding ‘depends’
or ‘varies’.

the same sex were always wrong compared with less than a fifth of people aged 18–24.
Overall, almost two in five people thought such relationships were always wrong, with
about one in five thinking they were not wrong at all. Four in five people thought it
always or mostly wrong for a married person to have sexual relations with someone
other than their spouse, and a similar proportion thought that sex between a boy and
a girl aged under 16 was always or mostly wrong.

Feminist perspectives on sexuality

Largely following Ann Oakley’s (1972) distinction between sex, gender and sexuality,
feminists have argued that although gender and sexuality are conceptually distinct,
they are so closely interrelated in terms of our lived experience that we cannot
understand one without reference to the other. Indeed, as Jackson and Scott (1996,
p. 3) have put it, ‘it is the relationship between the two which makes sexuality a crucial
issue for feminists’. Furthermore, feminists have argued that sexuality is embedded
within power relations shaped, at least in part, by gender as well as other aspects of
identity such as social class, race and ethnicity, global power relations, age, disability,
and so on, ‘so that we each live our sexuality from different locations within society’,
as Jackson and Scott have put it (1996, p. 3). Feminists have criticised so-called
scientific approaches to sexuality, arguing that they are largely contradictory in defining
women as both asexual and saturated with sexuality (Poovey, 1989).

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Radical feminists in particular have emphasised that, in the main, it is men who
abuse, harass and rape women. It is men who buy and use pornography and it is men
who buy commercial sex. It is men who become sex offenders and killers. For radical
feminists women’s subordination is perpetuated primarily through men’s control of
women’s bodies and sexuality. One of the strongest theoretical elaborations of the
role of sexuality in maintaining women’s oppression was developed by Catharine
MacKinnon (1982), who argued that just as the exploitation of labour is at the heart of
class relations, so sexual exploitation is fundamental to what she calls the ‘sex class
system’. In particular, MacKinnon (1987) has argued that pornography is the foun-
dation of male dominance because it portrays women in dehumanising ways – as the
subservient playthings of men – and that this shapes how men (as a group) see women
(as a group), and how women see themselves and each other. A related charge is
that pornography promotes and incites sexual violence. Radical feminists argue that
pornography, like many forms of male sexuality, degrades and abuses women, that it
is primarily about the eroticisation of men’s power over women, and that it is an
ideology that promotes violence against women. As Rebecca Huntley has noted,

radical feminists reserve a special kind of hatred for . . . fetish pornography focused
on physical deformity, for example involving amputees and the physically dis-
abled, [which] is singled out and attacked as the worst kind of pornographic
material. Possibly because pornography that features ‘atypical’ bodies emphasizes
the fact that pornography is so clearly about ‘the body’ as a sexual object. In
the same way, pornography that involves pregnant women is equally reviled.
(Huntley, 2000, p. 352)

More libertarian feminists argue that any form of censorship is socially undesirable
and ultimately works against women’s interests, and that censorship would also restrict
the availability of feminist and lesbian erotica. Other feminists argue that the pornog-
raphy debate, and the preoccupation with sexuality more generally, deflects attention
from other important feminist issues.
It is not difficult therefore to understand why sexuality has been so central to
feminist theory and politics, for as Jackson and Scott note,

Historically, enormous efforts, from chastity belts to property laws, have been
made to control female sexuality and to tie women to individual men through
monogamous heterosexual relationships. The double standard of morality has
entitled men to sexual freedoms denied to women. It has also divided women
themselves into two categories: the respectable Madonna and the rebarbative
whore. Women’s sexuality has been policed and regulated in a way which men’s
has not: it is the woman prostitute who is stigmatized and punished, not her male
clients. Heterosexual activity has always been risky for women, associated as it
is with loss of ‘reputation’, with unwanted pregnancy and with diseases which
threaten fertility. Women have also been vulnerable to male sexual violence and
coercion, yet held responsible for both their own and their assailants’ behaviour.
(Jackson and Scott, 1996, p. 3)

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All this provided the impetus for the feminist critique of the sexual objectification
of women in beauty contests such as Miss World, in pornography, and through the
commodification of women in prostitution, as well as the subjection of women to
sexual violence since the 1970s. Indeed, feminists have sought to emphasise the
relationship between women’s sexual objectification and their vulnerability to sexual
violence – some by arguing that there is a direct connection (that ‘pornography is the
theory, rape is the practice’), others by arguing that ‘pornography contributes to
the cultural construction of a particular form of masculinity and sexual desire which
make rape possible and which script the possibilities for its enactment’ (Jackson and
Scott, 1996, p. 23). Much of this critique has contributed to a fundamental criticism of
heterosexual practice and ultimately of the institution of heterosexuality itself.
Feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys (1990) have emphasised the co-option of women
into heterosexuality as a manifestation of patriarchal power, along with a series
of social assumptions about what it means to ‘have sex’ being defined largely in patri-
archal, heterosexual terms. Jeffreys’s critique of the assumption that the sexual
revolution was a milestone in the struggle for women’s sexual freedom emphasises
that many aspects of so-called sexual liberation should actually be seen as directly
opposed to feminism, involving, rather than an increase in sexual freedom for women,
an eroticisation of women’s oppression. Sexologists, she argues, ‘have been the high
priests who have organized the worship of male power’ (p. 1) and in doing so have
affirmed the institutional status of heterosexuality.
In her account of heterosexuality and lesbian existence, Adrienne Rich (1980)
similarly focused on the institutionalisation of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, arguing
that what was assumed to be either a natural drive or a social choice was imposed
on women. Sociologists have subsequently used this concept to describe the ways
in which heterosexism and homophobia have been institutionalised in law, education,
religion and language. There are more than 70 countries across the world that
criminalise homosexual acts and some of these – Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia,
for instance – have the death penalty for gay sex (Amnesty International, 2001).
Feminists have seen heterosexuality as an institution through which men
appropriate women’s bodies and their labour. Some, particularly those who came to
identify as ‘political lesbians’ in the 1970s, argued that romantic attachments with men
led only to exploitation. The feminist critique of heterosexuality meant that for many
feminists ‘lesbianism began to be seen as both a viable alternative and a form of
resistance to patriarchal domination’ (Jackson and Scott, 1996, p. 12). It was tensions
between these radical, ‘separatist’ women and other feminists which Jackson and Scott
(1996) argue proved to be particularly disruptive for feminist politics at the end of the
1970s, and which in part ‘made a unified women’s movement increasingly difficult
to sustain’ (p. 14). Indeed, debates on heterosexuality and lesbianism have been a
major source of tension within feminist theory and politics. Some, as Jackson and
Scott outline, have been the destructive cause of major rifts within the women’s
movement, others have been more productive in forcing feminists to theorise women’s
diverse sexual experiences and attitudes more adequately.

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Women’s sexual experiences and attitudes

In her first and most well-known work, Married Love (1918), Marie Stopes emphasised
the need for a woman to be aroused as a preliminary to sex, and for satisfactory orgasm
for both parties. As Lesley Hall (2000) noted in her account of women’s attitudes
to sex throughout the course of the twentieth century, Stopes practically became a
brand name for a new genre of woman-centred sexual advice, but she was not the
only woman writing in this field. The female doctor Isabel Hutton also indicated
the importance of female orgasm in her book The Hygiene of Marriage (published in
1923) as well as the need for preliminary arousal for women’s enjoyment of sex (cited
in Hall, 2000). Another doctor, Helena Wright (1930), produced a short guide to sex
for women, The Sex Factor in Marriage in 1930, with a sequel More About The Sex Factor
in Marriage in 1947. She too placed supreme importance on women’s right to sexual
arousal and satisfaction. Wright was adamant that a penile–vaginal model of sex was
inadequate for many women, and strongly advocated women familiarising them-
selves with their genitalia and exploring ways of stimulating themselves. In her later
work (Wright, 1947), she described how many women remained ignorant of the idea
that they too could derive pleasure from sexual relations within marriage, reporting
one female patient who, when asked about the happiness or otherwise of her sex
life, asked ‘Why doctor, what is there to enjoy?’ This attitude was also reported by
other writers on women and sexuality such as Slater and Woodside (1951, p. 5) who
found that ‘husbands are valued in an inverse relation to sexuality: “he’s very good,
he doesn’t bother me much”’. Among the women Slater and Woodside interviewed,
sex was seen as a duty to be undertaken with endurance, but from which they did not
expect to derive any particular pleasure.
Later work, such as Chesser’s The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the
Englishwoman published in 1956, found that when women did experience sexual
pleasure they found it difficult to articulate. As he puts it, ‘many women have difficulty
in describing their sexual sensations, in defining the nature of their sexual pleasures,
and are confused as to the definition of their genital experiences’ (p. 421, quoted
in Hall, 2000, p. 4). He also found that many women felt ashamed to admit that they
did not experience orgasm. Clearly, the increased importance given to mutual sexual
gratification in marriage brought about its own problems and pressures. In fact,
this was the situation that had prompted Wright to expand upon her previous work,
conceding that although a certain degree of improvement had resulted from the
wider dissemination of sexual guidance to women, it ought to be conceded that
ignorance had to an extent given way to performance anxiety. Hence, ‘lacking direct
information about sex and marriage, and with misleading ideas gleaned from romances,
films and popular music’, many women were embittered to discover that their own
experiences of sexual relations within marriage were rather different from the ideal
(Hall, 2000, p. 6).
Shere Hite’s initial report in 1976 in many ways only substantiated the insights of
these earlier writers – Hite actually cites Helena Wright’s work on the need for women
to familiarise themselves with their own bodies and sexual potential (Hite, 1976). In
her recently updated report, Hite (2000) emphasises the continuing dominance of a
penetrative model of ‘real’ sex, and the gap between women’s own sexual feelings

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and experiences of sexual pleasure within heterosexual relations, and media images
of women as sexual beings that, she argues, are defined largely in terms of male sexual
fantasies.
The kinds of issues explored in Hite’s second report have also been considered
by feminist researchers, particularly those focusing on young women and sexual health
promotion. In Ruling Passions, Sue Lees (1997), for instance, argues that to speak of
a woman’s ‘reputation’ still invokes her sexual experiences, and this remains central
to the way in which she is judged both in everyday life (in education, for example) and
by courts, and welfare and law enforcement agencies. Her recent research on
adolescent girls found that the fear of being labelled a ‘slag’ or a ‘slut’ (by both boys
and other girls) is still a potent force that serves to contain and control young women’s
sexual self-presentation and behaviour (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of her earlier
research – Lees, 1986, 1993). Within sex education, Lees points out, girls are not
presented as desiring subjects or initiators of sexual encounters but rather as sexual
victims, having to defend themselves against the threat of disease, pregnancy and
being ‘used’.
Similar conclusions were reached in The Male in the Head: Young People,
Heterosexuality and Power, based on interviews with young women in London and
Manchester by the Women, Risk and Aids Project (Holland et al., 1998). Here Holland
and her colleagues comment on the continuing lack of sexual agency amongst young
women, concluding from their findings that an active female sexual desire is almost
inconceivable to the young men and women who took part in their research. Rather,
they found that even girls who were conscious of their own sexual desires were under
considerable pressures to contain these, and to focus instead on developing stable
heterosexual relationships. Drawing on Foucault’s (1979) analysis of sexuality as
the outcome of discourse considered above, their account emphasises the extent to
which

Adopting different languages of sex and love is a crucial mechanism in the

constitution of gender within heterosexuality. The choices that young people
make about the language they use and the discourses they invoke are shaped and
constrained by existing power relations and have powerful effects. Although young
people may be aware of and resist these processes as individuals, they are
nevertheless complicit in collectivities that reproduce these divisions.
(Holland et al., 1998, p. 89)

In particular, for instance, they note that ‘metaphors of battle and conquest are central
to the way young men talk about their experiences in the male peer group’ (p. 87),
whereas an emphasis on relationships and romance characterises young women’s use
of language in their discussions of sexual encounters. Similar research carried out in
New Zealand by Jackson and Cram (2003) highlights that although young women’s
discussions of sexual relationships and experiences suggest various ways in which
the double standard is disrupted, ultimately these are individual rather than collective
acts of resistance, and so the sexual double standard remains relatively stable. They
argue that despite significant changes in the social landscape over recent decades,
young women’s negotiations of heterosexuality remain dominated by the sexual

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double standard according to which an active, desiring sexuality is positively regarded

in men, but denigrated and regulated by negative labelling in women.
Hence, research on women’s experiences of sexuality and their attitudes to sex
has identified some obvious changes since the publication of Marie Stopes’s Married
Love. It is no longer assumed amongst most ethnic groups that a woman will be
a virgin when she marries, or that her future husband will have been her only sexual
partner. Many women cohabit in lesbian or heterosexual relationships rather than
marry, or remain single. Birth control is more widely available and reliable than pre-
viously, as is abortion, though sexually transmitted diseases and sexual violence remain
important issues, as do prostitution and pornography. Sexual reputation, and the
fear of losing it, are still powerful constraints affecting not only social relationships but
also encounters with judicial and welfare systems. This latter theme is emphasised
by Gail Hawkes (1995) in her discussion of young women and ‘family planning’ in the
UK, which emphasises the regulatory content of family planning practice, directed
particularly at young women ‘whose lifestyles are deemed “irresponsible”, and who
are, therefore, considered as illegitimate family planners’ (p. 257).

Sexuality and power relations

As Therborn (2004, p. 1) has noted, sex and power are intimately related: ‘sex may lead
to power, through the conduit of seduction. Power is also a basis for obtaining sex,
whether by force or lubricated with money and what it can buy.’

Sexuality and oppression

Many feminists have developed critical analyses of sexual violence, pornography

and prostitution which have emphasised the ways in which the sexual appropriation
of women serves as a mechanism of social control. One key theme that has emerged
from much of this work is the link between heterosexual power relations and sexual
violence, so much so that some feminists such as Liz Kelly (1988) have argued that
sexual violence is best understood as a continuum, ranging from the myriad forms
of sexism women encounter everyday, through to the murder of women and girls by
men at the other extreme. She describes as ‘pressurized sex’ sexual relations that
women are expected to have with men, even when they do not really want to. As
Jackson and Scott (1996, pp. 17–18) have noted, ‘within dominant cultural discourses,
men are cast as the active initiators of sexual activity and women as passive recipients
of male advances; men’s desires are seen as uncontrollable urges which women are
paradoxically expected both to satisfy and to restrain’.
Sexual violence has been a major concern of feminists, and a key site of feminist
political activism. While sexual violence might appear to be an issue around which all
feminists could unite, since all women regardless of sexual orientation, social class,
race, disability or age can be subject to violence, the various intersections of oppression
mean that women’s actual experiences of violence and the threat of violence might
vary considerably. As Jackson and Scott note with regard to the relationship between
race and sexual violence, for instance,

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Sexual violence has very specific meanings for black women, since routine sexual
exploitation, coercion and brutality towards women have been very much a
part of the history of slavery and colonialism. This renders it inseparable from
racism: enslaved and colonized women have been subject to specific racialized
forms of patriarchal oppression and sexualized forms of racial oppression. This is
complicated by the ways in which black masculinity under colonial and slave
regimes has been constructed as a threat to white women.
(Jackson and Scott, 1996, p. 18)

bell hooks (1982) has argued that white feminists have tended to see the rape of women
slaves as merely an historical incidence of sexual violence, and hence have failed to
acknowledge the extent to which the abuse of Black women continues to be framed
by the legacy of colonial discourses and power relations, manifest, for example,
in terms of exaggerated fears of the rape of white women by Black men, in overtly
sexualised images of Black men and women, and in racist and sexist ideologies
about inter-ethnic sexual relations, all of which, she argues, amount to a continued
devaluation and sexualisation of Black womanhood.
Emphasising that rape should be understood in terms of power relations rather
than sexual relations, feminists have focused on sexual violence as an enactment of male
power. The regularity with which women are subject to male sexual violence has led
some feminists to emphasise the eroticisation of women’s oppression in popular and
media culture, and to argue that rape and sexual violence are extreme manifestations
of much broader cultural phenomena.
Pornography is another central issue for feminists in this respect, and one that is
complicated by a range of perspectives. Some feminists see pornography as centrally
implicated in women’s oppression and campaign against it, others argue vehemently
against feminism aligning itself with any form of censorship or moral conservatism,
while others maintain that the production of feminist pornography potentially amounts
to a politics of subversion (McIntosh, 1992). Others highlight the material aspects of
pornography, emphasising that pornography entails more than just representations
since it involves the employment of real women as models and actors and in a
whole range of associated occupations such as stripping, dancing and hostessing.
Indeed, from this latter perspective (one with which we, the authors, would agree),
prostitution and pornography are both most appropriately understood as part of a
‘sex industry’ and with reference to the concept of commercial sex, or ‘sex work’.
These terms emphasise that commercial sex involves not just prostitution, but also the
production and consumption of pornography, as well as other areas less commonly
researched to date, such as telephone sex work, ‘call girl’ or escort services, as well as
work in lap and pole dancing clubs (Weitzer, 2000). The increasing prevalence of these
more peripheral forms of sex work, particularly given developments in communication
technologies such as telephone call centres and the internet, has meant that what
Karen Sharpe (1998) has described as the ‘problem of prostitution’ – namely, how to
regulate it – remains a perpetual issue. Some feminists argue that only fundamental
social reorganisation will address the demand for commercial sex, others adopt
a more reformist approach and maintain that prostitution should be decriminalised.
One of the most commonly proposed strategies in this respect is that prostitutes should

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be put in state-registered brothels. However, as Sharpe notes, radical feminists in

particular argue that such a strategy would simply ‘signify the state’s validation of
the use of women’s bodies as commodities’ (p. 160). Others have argued that the
decriminalisation of soliciting could create a ‘sexual free for all’ for men (Wilson, 1983,
p. 224).
Feminist anti-prostitution activists and feminists such as Kathleen Barry (1995)
have argued that prostitution has undergone a process of industrialisation in many
parts of the world since the 1960s. Through this process prostituted men, women
and children have come under the control of big business in the Western world, as
prostitution has been legalised and normalised. The International Labour Organization
report on prostitution in Southeast Asia entitled The Sex Sector (Lim, 1998) suggests
that prostitution is so important economically to the countries of Southeast Asia that
there is a strong argument for recognising and legitimising it:

The scale of prostitution has been enlarged to an extent where we can justifiably
speak of a commercial sex sector that is integrated into the economic, social
and political life of these countries. The sex business has assumed the dimensions
of an industry and has directly or indirectly contributed in no small measure to
employment, national income and economic growth.
(Lim, 1998, p. vi)

One of the most fundamental divisions between different groups of feminist

theorists and activists concerned with prostitution has focused on the distinction
between ‘forced’ and ‘free’ prostitution, and is based upon the notion that adult women
may exercise the free will of an individual and ‘choose’ prostitution or ‘consent’ to
it. Scambler and Scambler’s (1997) Rethinking Prostitution is a collection of essays by
academics, activists and members of the English Collective of Prostitutes that
advocates thinking about prostitution as sex work and which considers some of these
issues. Without wishing to assert that ‘all engagement in sex work is a function of free
and informed choice’, the editors hold that the starting point for any feminist-oriented
analysis of prostitution should be ‘the respectful attribution of agency’ (p. xv).
Anti-prostitution activists such as Sheila Jeffreys (1997, 1998) are critical of the
concept of ‘choice’, however, pointing out that economic coercion makes a nonsense
of any idea of free choice, as do other constraining circumstances that act upon
women’s lives, such as gender ideologies. Feminists such as Jeffreys argue that ‘women
are not free agents, operating on a level playing field upon which they rationally choose
prostitution over other occupations for the advantages it offers’ (Jeffreys, 1998,
p. 69). Rather, women’s choices are already shaped by established patterns of gender
inequality – what Carole Pateman (1988) calls the ‘sexual contract’ – that restrict
women’s ability to exercise agency in this respect. Hence, anti-prostitution feminists
opposed to the concept of free choice prostitution emphasise that women constitute
an oppressed sex class whose subordination has historically been symbolised in
their exchange as sexual and reproductive servants between men (Dworkin, 1981). In
Sheila Jeffrey’s words, ‘the argument of “choice” is used by those determined studiously
to ignore these facts of the material power difference between men and women, those
committed to rampant individualism’ (1998, p. 69).

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For Jeffreys, ‘men’s prostitution behaviour is the problem’ (1998, p. 70), and
particularly the idea that men’s prostitution use is based on an inevitable and un-
stoppable male sexual desire, perhaps a biological necessity, which is best channelled
into ‘harmless’ outlets. This ideology reflects the ‘biological essences’ model of sexuality
considered above, and is one that feminists such as Jeffreys have been particularly
critical of, arguing that

in fact, men’s prostitution abuse is not ‘natural’ behaviour but the result of the idea
that such sexual abuse of women and children is vital for health, enjoyed by
women, a right of manhood. The idea of prostitution abusers that it is reasonable,
or even their birthright, to insert their penises in the bodies of other less powerful
human beings who can be paid to tolerate it, is a learnt idea.
(Jeffreys, 1998, p. 70)

Jeffreys points out that prostitution tourism depends upon pro-prostitution abuse
attitudes formed in the West. As she puts it,

Affluent cultures in the west and in the east which teach boys and men that the
sexual use of women and children, irrespective of their pleasure or personhood,
is a natural right of their masculinity, produces sex tourists and prostitution
abusers.
(Jeffreys, 1998, p. 70)

Also focusing on sex tourism in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, Thailand
and South Africa, Julia O’Connell Davidson (1998) describes three types of sex
tourist:

1 ‘Macho lads in pornutopia’ who are socialised to believe that ‘true’ masculinity
involves exercising control over other men, over women and over their bodies:
‘this is partly because sexual access to prostitutes is extremely cheap, partly because
there is an extensive array of commoditised sex on offer and partly because their
racism allows them to reduce “Other” women and children to nothing more than
their sex’ (p. 25).
2 ‘Women-haters’ who are socialised to believe that the human male has a natural,
biological need to penetrate women, so that ‘some men imagine themselves
as victims of a biological compulsion to have sex’ (p. 26). Such men therefore think
of women as controlling a resource (their female bodies) that is vital to men’s
physical and psychological well-being. Again, racism plays a key role in disinhibiting
such men.
3 ‘Situational prostitute users’ who are not prostitute users in their home countries, but
become sex tourists ‘partly because they don’t recognize informal sector
prostitution as prostitution, and partly because they too buy into highly sexualized
forms of racism’ (p. 29).

Crucially, in sex tourism gender ideologies are compounded by racism routinely used
by the travel industry, which often conflates the ‘exotic’ and the ‘erotic’ in its advertising.

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Anti-pornography campaigners tend to focus largely on the degradation and

exploitation of women involved in all aspects of the sex industry. Others are wary of
seeing women only as victims of commercial sex, and are more concerned with
recognising and reforming the working conditions of sex workers (Alexander, 1988).
These are clearly complex issues given the wide variety of forms that sex work takes
in different social, economic and geographical contexts as well as across a variety
of media forms. The increasing prevalence of live sex shows broadcast on websites
for instance problematises the traditional distinction between pornography and
prostitution (one that feminists have tended to be critical of). Taking account of these
various complexities, Jackson and Scott (1996, p. 24) argue that ‘a feminist perspective
should encompass both the economic relations which shape women’s position within
the sex industry and the patriarchal relations which make this particular form of
exploitation possible’. Of course, the economics of prostitution are shaped not only
by local labour markets but also by the global division of labour and by post-colonial
power relations. Hence, within sex tourism post-colonial women are constructed as
exotically docile and hospitable. In the local context in which women are recruited,
research suggests that poverty is a major motivating factor for entry into sex work.
Feminist anti-pornography campaigner Andrea Dworkin (1981) has also drawn
attention to the etymological connections between pornography and prostitution,
reminding us that the term ‘pornography’ refers to the ‘graphic depiction of women as
vile whores’, who exist only to serve men’s sexual needs. She argues that the whore
can only figure in male imagination under patriarchal domination, according to which
women are reduced to the status of sex objects.
Of course, both prostitution and pornography provide employment for women
and raise general questions about the relative position of women in the labour market,
as well as the circumstances in which these particular groups of women work.
Women’s involvement in the sex industry is directly related to their lack of economic
opportunities elsewhere, and to their vulnerability to poverty and social exclusion.
What makes these issues particularly problematic for feminists is that their objection
to pornography and prostitution has often placed feminist activists in an alliance with
the moral Right, and particularly with defenders of the patriarchal family and of
women’s sexual passivity. Judith Walkowitz (1980) has shown, for instance, that
feminist campaigners since the nineteenth century have often found their arguments
hijacked by moral conservatives who have sought to ‘protect’ women rather than
promote women’s sexual rights. In contrast, a feminist critique of commercial sex has
been concerned primarily with the sexual objectification of women’s bodies and with
the working conditions of women employed in the sex industry.
Though prostitution is an economic exchange, feminists have argued that it differs
from other forms of employment in significant ways. Although the sex industry is
a thriving economy in many countries across the world, it is not a ‘mainstream’ sector
of the labour market and, in general, governments and other funding agencies have
been interested in prostitution only as a problem of social control or public health. In
sociology, this has often meant that prostitution has been studied not as a form of
economic exchange, but as a public health risk, with the empirical focus being primarily
on street prostitution (its most visible and seemingly uncontrollable form). As a result,
the available body of empirical evidence on prostitution has tended to reflect a concern

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with the characteristics and practices of individual prostitutes (their health, psyche,
sexual history, criminality and drug use, for instance), and a relative neglect of the
social and organisational aspects of prostitution, power relations within the sex industry
as a whole, and within client–prostitute relations, as well as a neglect of questions
about the demand for prostitution. As Julia O’Connell Davidson (1997, p. 777) has put
it, ‘this represents a very real problem for all those who are engaged in theoretical,
political or policy debate on prostitution’. Feminist research has begun to address
this, however, and several ethnographic studies have been undertaken in recent years
that have focused on various forms of prostitution, looking at the work experiences of
prostitutes themselves.
This research has highlighted that prostitutes often work in dangerous and
degrading conditions, with little or no protection from the state or their employer, or
from the medical profession. Although much criticised on grounds of its unproblematic
association of prostitution with HIV/AIDS, drug abuse and public health issues
(Adkins, 1997; O’Connell Davidson, 1997), in their account of street prostitution, based
on three years’ research involving interviews with prostitutes and their clients, as
well as observational research in a red light area, McKeganey and Barnard (1996,
p. 70), for instance, document the risks to women as they negotiate with clients and
also their vulnerability to violence. As one of the contributors to their research put
it, ‘if you lose your wits about you in this business you’re done for’. Whittaker and Hart
(1996) have also carried out research highlighting the extent to which sex workers
operating in flats have to employ protective strategies such as co-working with ‘maids’
to protect themselves against the threat of violence from clients.
Research also suggests a strong degree of mutual support amongst prostitutes
themselves. Downe (1999), for instance, highlights how sex workers in Costa Rica use
humour as a way of resisting and coping with pain, humiliation and the fear of violence
by re-framing traumatic experiences. Sanders (2004) identified a similar culture of
coping through professional banter in her study of prostitution in the UK. Crucial
to the discourse and identity of the prostitutes in Sanders’s study was a sense of
themselves as professional sex workers:

They adopt the stereotypical image of the ‘happy hooker’ and the aesthetic
characteristics of ‘the prostitute’, conforming to culturally prescribed norms of
femininity as a strategy to attract and maintain a regular client base. Usually
this entails adapting physical appearance, dress code, make-up and hairstyle
as well as observable personality traits to conform to male expectations. A small
number of interviewees considered cosmetic facial surgery and breast implants
as capital investments for the role of sex provider.
(Sanders, 2004, p. 282)

Sanders emphasises in particular the importance of solidarity amongst women working

in the sex industry:

Debbie and Louise have been working for 20 years, much of that together. During
the 12 visits I made to their premises they would be laughing, joking and fooling
around. They explained their behaviour was not a reflection of how they enjoy sex

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work but out of necessity: ‘If we didn’t laugh so much we would just cry’ (Louise).
They were adamant that the only reason they survived prostitution is their
friendship, solidarity and strength in coping together. ‘We learned to laugh a long
time ago, to make it less real and to stop us from hating to have to come here’
(Debbie).
(Sanders, 2004, p. 284)

On a more global level, feminist groups have highlighted the vulnerability of

women and children to sex trafficking, particularly in Central and Eastern European
states (Therborn, 2004). The fact that trafficking is not only illegal, however, but also
often connected to organised networks of violence and corruption means that access
to research evidence is limited, if not impossible. The UN estimates that trafficked
individuals are the commodities of a multi-billion dollar global industry dominated
by highly organised (male-dominated) criminal networks, and that economic hard-
ship, obstacles to migration and armed conflict in many of the world’s developing
and transitional countries have resulted in a considerable rise in the number of cases
involving trafficking (www.unece.org). While trafficking routes vary over time, the
direction remains relatively constant, namely from poorer countries to relatively
wealthy ones. Doezema (2002) has argued in her critique of the UN Trafficking
Protocol that current notions of ‘consent’, reflected in the ambiguity of the Protocol,
are inadequate to serve as the basis for political strategies to protect the rights of sex
workers and migrants because they purport views of female sexuality as ‘both more
virtuous and more dangerous than men’s’ (p. 20) and because they fail to take account
of the material circumstances within which women may provide ‘consent’.
Sex trafficking and tourism have become a particular problem for women and
girls in Southeast Asia. Macionis and Plummer (2002, p. 297) report for instance that
Bangkok is emerging as the sex-tourism capital of the world, and that almost half
of the estimated 800,000 prostitutes in Thailand are under 18. In some cases, they
note, parents sell female infants into the sex trade who are then raised by agents until
they are able to work as prostitutes, to solicit in sex bars or to work in live sex shows.
Agents provide girls with clothes and housing but (much like the old Geisha system
of debt bondage) at a price that far exceeds their earnings, so that women are effec-
tively sex slaves. Drawing on research by Kempadoo and Doezema (1998) and
O’Connell Davidson (1998), Macionis and Plummer estimate that the number of
girls and women involved is rapidly increasing: some 8 per cent of the female popula-
tion of Thailand are thought to be employed in the sex industry, about 40 per cent of
whom are estimated to be HIV positive. In addition, concubinage is still thought to be
a widespread social phenomenon amongst the upper-middle classes of Southeast
Asia, especially in Thailand.
Much of the Western research on prostitution in Southeast Asia, however, tends
to replicate many of the earlier problems associated with defining prostitutes
themselves as the problem. As Siriporn Skrobanek (of the Foundation for Women in
Bangkok) puts it,

Women in Thailand are viewed as ‘the other women’, whose status is perceived
as lower than that of women in the West. . . . But since there are two sides in a

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commercial transaction between foreign visitors and Thai women, why is only one
party to the deal (Thai women and their society) the target of investigation, while
the other party (the sex tourists) goes unexamined?
(quoted in Seabrook, 1996, p. vii)

Sexuality, pleasure and resistance

As well as sexuality as a site of oppression and exploitation for women, feminists

have also emphasised the extent to which sexuality can be a cultural resource through
which gender oppression can be challenged and resisted. Holland et al. (1994, p. 34)
for instance have argued that sexuality constitutes an intimate yet social space within
which men’s power can be subverted and resisted and that ‘if women can recognize
and capture this space, they can negotiate relationships with men which upset the
gender hierarchy and so are potentially socially destabilizing’. From this perspective,
which emphasises not power over sexuality but rather the power of sexuality, sexuality
is viewed as a site of hegemonic struggle on which gender relations can be contested.
It is also viewed as the site of pleasure, and feminists such as Anne Koedt (1972), in
her influential discussion of sexuality from a radical feminist perspective, have empha-
sised women’s right to derive pleasure from sexuality. Amber Hollibaugh (1989)
has similarly argued that feminists must give equal attention to sexual danger and
sexual pleasure, suggesting that there is a need to develop a feminist language of sexual
pleasure that recognises that power in sex can be a source of both pleasure and
resistance to gender oppression.
Research has highlighted several ways in which sexuality can be used as a way
of challenging and resisting patriarchal oppression and heterosexual hegemony. We
consider three examples here:

1 female promiscuity as a challenge to dominant ideas about women’s sexual passivity

and to patriarchal control of women’s sexuality;
2 camp as a potential way of resisting and parodying hegemonic masculinity and
what Judith Butler (1990) describes as ‘the heterosexual matrix’ – the idea that
‘normal’ men are masculine and sexually dominant and that ‘normal’ women are
feminine and sexually servile, and that a particular configuration of the relationship
between sex, gender and sexuality is natural – and the gender order; and finally,
3 the emergence of so-called gay villages – distinct social (and commercial) spaces
in urban areas that potentially represent a challenge to the marginalisation and
exclusion of gay and lesbian people, and the social dominance of ‘compulsory
heterosexuality’ (Rich, 1980).

Female promiscuity
One interesting example of hegemonic struggle over gender relations often cited by
feminists is female promiscuity. Because of the sexual double standard, reinforced
by ‘scientific’ perspectives on sexuality as a biological essence, outlined above, women
have traditionally been thought of as naturally sexually passive, whereas men have

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tended to be regarded as naturally sexually active. Female promiscuity – taking part

in multiple and frequent sexual relationships – has tended to be regarded, particularly
in medical and moral discourse, as a psychiatric disorder amongst young women.
Promiscuity amongst young girls has often been cited as an argument against wide-
spread sex education in schools; and in social work and protective social welfare
discourse promiscuous women have often been described as being in moral danger,
or as being ‘out of control’. Medical practitioners frequently cite female promiscuity
as a cause of the spread of herpes, cervical cancer and also (to a lesser extent) HIV.
In this sense, some feminists have argued that promiscuity might be regarded
as a liberatory strategy used against the restriction and prescriptions of ‘normal’
femininity. In her book Promiscuities, for instance, Naomi Wolf (1997) argues that
promiscuity can be ‘a source of pleasure and strength, not of shame and vulnerability’.
Other feminists, however, have argued that this perspective is a relatively narrow
ethnocentric one that fails to take account of the experiences of Black and Asian
women who have tended to be sexualised, racialised and gendered simultaneously
within colonial ideologies and power relations (hooks, 1992). Others have argued
further, that cultural representations of women as primarily sexual merely reinforce
rather than subvert established patriarchal perceptions of women as sex objects,
perceptions that are often used to justify sexual harassment and violence against
women. Others have argued that a cultural focus on women as sex objects – in
advertising or pop music videos, for instance – merely serves to perpetuate patriarchal
stereotypes about both male and female sexuality.

Camp

In every culture, sexual relations are bound by formal and informal social rules
concerning both with whom a person may have sexual relations, and how those
relationships should be conducted. Homosexuality, in most Western cultures, as Jeff
Weeks (1986) has pointed out, ‘carries a heavy legacy of taboo’. But this is not the
case in every culture, nor has it been true of all historical periods. In ancient Greece,
for instance, love between two males was thought to be a ‘higher’ form of intimacy
than that between a man and a woman. Nevertheless, as we have already noted, in
many contemporary societies, homosexuality is not only stigmatised but criminalised
(in many African countries, for instance). Many countries’ legal codes do not make
provision for lesbianism, but in some countries (such as Pakistan) it too is illegal. Some
countries – such as China – have only relatively recently officially acknowledged
the existence of gay and lesbian sexualities. The law in most European societies is
more tolerant, however, with recent legislation in the UK equalising the age of consent
and introducing legal protection against discrimination on grounds of sexual orien-
tation. That said, many gay men and lesbian women still conceal their sexuality for fear
of hostility, particularly in the workplace, for instance (Hall, 1989; Adkins, 2000). Some
feminists, such as Judith Butler (1990), have argued that one of the ways in which
homophobia and heterosexual hegemony is undermined is by parodying it in an
ironic way: by making what she calls ‘gender trouble’, invoking, for instance, a ‘camp’
performance of gender.

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In her ‘Notes on Camp’, Susan Sontag (1984, p. 275) argued that ‘the essence of
camp is its love of the unnatural: of the artifice and exaggeration’. Of the many themes
she identifies as definitive of camp – often associated with the culture of gay masculinity
– Sontag emphasises that camp is ‘a sensibility that, among other things, converts
the serious into the frivolous’ (1984, p. 276). Camp, then, is playful and anti-serious and
suggests a ‘spilling over’ of an irrepressible, uncontrolled sensibility that contemporary
feminists such as Butler (1990) have argued represents a form of cultural resistance to
gender and sexual power relations. This view echoes Sontag’s earlier claim that camp
can be understood as a kind of cultural defence mechanism, one that celebrates rather
than berates exclusion from the cultural and sexual mainstream. Seen from this
angle, camp has a radical and transgressive potential, Butler argues. As cultural theorist
Richard Dyer (1992, p. 136) has put it: ‘Identity and togetherness, fun and wit, self-
protection and thorns in the flesh of straight society – these are the pluses of camp.’
Camp also denies any essential sex, gender or sexuality. Rather, like postmodernist
approaches to sexuality (and feminism – see Chapter 2), and particularly queer theory,
it emphasises that all three are performances and not essences.
As a cultural phenomenon, camp has been criticised, however, particularly by
gay rights activists for its politics, or rather lack thereof. Dyer (1992) comments that
camp finds sexual politics in the form of the CHE (campaign for homosexual equality)
and GLF (gay liberation front) simply ‘too dull’. As Melly (1984, cited in Meyer, 1994,
p. 22) has also noted, for many gay activists, camp tends to be viewed largely as
an artefact of the ‘closet’ – the idea that homosexuality should be concealed; as an
anachronistic embarrassment that fuels gay stereotypes and affirms heteronormative
cultural perceptions of the gay community. Camp has therefore been interpreted as a
sign of both oppression, and of the acceptance of cultural repression, but also as
a cultural style that represents a mode of resistance to that oppression.

Gay spaces and villages

Another example of possible resistance to sexual oppression can be identified in the

existence of virtual sexual communities on the internet (Hanmer, 2003), as well as gay
‘villages’ in major towns and cities across the world – New York, Sydney and
Manchester being some of the most notable examples, that have been interpreted by
sociologists as an attempt to claim a ‘space’ for resistance. While these spaces are
geographical and social they are also of course largely commercial, and property
developers, retailers and leisure industry entrepreneurs have certainly not been slow
in the past decade or so to attract what has come to be known as the ‘pink pound’ or
dollar. As feminist writer Susan Bordo (1993, p. 196) puts it, ‘consumer capitalism
depends on the continual production of novelty, of fresh images to stimulate desire,
and it frequently drops into marginalized neighbourhoods in order to find them’.
Heterosexual attraction to so-called gay villages might therefore be thought of as a
form of what Suzanne Moore (1988) has described as ‘gender tourism’, as straight
‘tourists’ are able to take ‘package trips’ into gay culture and social spaces, but crucially,
as she notes, not necessarily into gay sex or politics. The effect, therefore, is more
commercial and cultural than political.

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Manchester’s gay village is an interesting case in point, in this respect, because

its development in recent years illustrates some of the ways in which sexuality is shaped
by what feminists and other sociologists following Foucault have argued is an interplay
of power and resistance. As feminist writer Beatrix Campbell recently noted,

When Greater Manchester’s former chief constable, James Anderton, accused the
city’s gay population in 1987 of ‘swirling around in a human cesspit of their own
making’, little did he know he would come to be regarded as one of the instigators
of Britain’s gayest city, and perhaps the most successful gay village in Europe. The
roll call would also have to include Margaret Thatcher, whose notorious Section
28 [a clause in the Local Government Act passed in Britain in 1988] . . . galvanized
a spectacular coalition, ranging from theatre impresarios to librarians, to defend
the right to a gay life. Neither could have anticipated how their crusades would
conjure up a queer constituency.
(Campbell, 2004, p. 30)

In the 1980s, the area around Canal Street in Manchester was still a heavily policed
red-light district, in which raids on gay nightclubs were commonplace. The effect, as
Campbell notes in her article ‘Village People’, was to activate the gay community in
Manchester, which forged an alliance with the city council which, in turn, gave support
to gay businesses. ‘The ghost of Anderton was finally laid to rest’, she notes, when
the current chief constable led his gay colleagues’ contingent at EuroPride in 2003, a
10-day Mardi Gras in the thriving gay village. ‘Now the place is so successful that it
simultaneously welcomes and dreads hordes of straight invaders’ (p. 30).
One of the main problems has in many ways been shaped by gender politics.
Manchester’s gay village quickly began to attract large groups of straight women
(many of them on hen nights) who felt safe and free from harassment there. However,
these groups of women were predictably followed in quick succession by large groups
of heterosexual ‘lads’ and corporate breweries, resulting in what Campbell describes
as a ‘straightening of the village’ in commercial and cultural terms. Conscious of
exploitation of the Village rather than investment in it, however, the established gay
community began to withdraw its custom from the straight, corporate bars and this
appears to have resulted in their withdrawal from the area and, as Campbell concludes,
quoting one of its main supporters, ‘the village is going gayer again’.
Each of these examples emphasises the complex and often contradictory power
relations that shape the relationship between gender and sexuality, one shaped by
power and resistance, as well as structure and agency. This is also the case with regard
to the ways in which sexuality is shaped by race and ethnicity.

Race, ethnicity and sexuality

Many Black feminists have argued that feminist debates on sexuality have often
proceeded without reference to divisions amongst women not related to sexual orien-
tation. Black feminists have been critical of white feminist tendencies to homogenise
women as a category, and also for their failure to challenge stereotypical social

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constructions of Black and Asian women’s sexuality. Feminists such as Patricia Hill
Collins and bell hooks have argued that paying attention to the intersections between
gender, sexuality and race reveals that sexual relationships with men may have
different meanings for Black and for white women.
Black and Asian women are often perceived as sexually exotic by white men. This
imagery is frequently mobilised in advertising for a whole range of products and
services from ice cream (Nayak, 1997) to airlines. Post-colonial women are often seen
as more submissive, obedient and hyper-feminine than Western women. Thus for
racialised women, their sexuality is often shaped by racist assumptions. Hence, ‘the
racism which is often a feature of pornography is not accidental, but is the product
of the double objectification of black women as objects to be used by their white
masters’ (Jackson and Scott, 1996, p. 22). Feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins (1990)
have therefore argued that an analysis of racism is central to a feminist understanding
of pornography and prostitution because racism does not simply compound sexism
but rather makes certain forms of sexual objectification possible. In particular, she
argues, biological theories of race and colonial ideologies underpin the depiction of
Black women in terms of an animalistic sexuality.
Anoop Nayak (1997) has recently explored some of these stereotypes in his
analysis of images of race and sexuality in advertisements for Häagen-Dazs ice cream.
He argues that in the body images that dominate these advertisements, Black bodies
are seen as a source of sexual desire and satisfaction – as ‘the exotic promise of an
extra-intense experience’ (p. 52). Here, and elsewhere in media and popular culture
he argues, ‘black sexuality is constructed as threatening, dangerous and in need of
control’ (p. 52). Not only do the ads he considers mark out visible, racial binary
oppositions between black and white, they then seek to ‘blend’ these through impli-
cations of inter-racial sex. Here, sexualised Black female bodies function as what
bell hooks (1990, p. 57) describes as ‘playing fields where racism and sexuality
converge’. In her paper entitled ‘Selling Hot Pussy’, hooks has argued that media
cultural portrayals of Black women’s sexuality are no longer premised on the white
supremacist assertion that ‘blondes have more fun’ but rather on equally racist and
sexist contentions that, as she puts it,

The ‘real fun’ is to be had by bringing to the surface all those ‘nasty’ unconscious
fantasies and longings about contact with the Other embedded in the secret (but
not so secret) deep structure of white supremacy.
(hooks, 1992, pp. 21–22)

Sexuality and HIV/AIDS

Many of the debates considered here have taken place against a backdrop of increasing
concern about HIV and AIDS and therefore about the potential dangers attached to
certain sexual practices, and often also attributed to particular sexual identities and
desires. As Sara Delamont (2003, p. 55) notes, ‘the HIV/AIDS panic produced another
impetus propelling sexuality into the sociological mainstream’. Fear of the risk of HIV
transmission might seem to close down the potential for sexual pleasure, but some

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feminists have argued that safer sex could be better sex, especially in a heterosexual
context. While ‘safe sex’ in health promotion discourse has tended to mean pene-
trative sex with a condom, feminists such as Ros Coward (1987) have sought to
promote a broader range of sexual practices arguing, for instance, that for heterosexual
women safer sex (which de-privileges penetrative sex) possibly enhances rather than
restricts the potential for sexual pleasure and more egalitarian sexual relations.
However, as Jackson and Scott (1996, p. 19) note, the balance of power in (hetero)-
sexual relationships, ‘along with wider cultural discourses and the sexual scripts which
men and women draw on, militate against women negotiating safer sex’. Research
highlights, for example, the extent to which young women continue to experience
problems in negotiating condom use when they have sex with men, and the ways in
which their efforts to practise safe sex are often undermined by gender power relations
which reaffirm male sexual ‘needs’ at the expense of women’s pleasure and safety,
relating largely to the difficulties women have in articulating their own sexual needs
and desires within heterosexual encounters (Holland et al., 1990). Jackie West (1999)
has argued, for instance, that young women remain inhibited in their exploration
of sexuality not only by heterosexual morality and their transitional status, but also
by gendered power relations that limit social acceptance of their sexual needs and
desires.
Other feminists, however, such as Fiona Stewart (1999) have argued that a
possible shift in definitions and practices of heterosexuality is currently taking place,
suggesting that modes of feminine heterosexuality that position young women as
relatively passive and helpless may be changing. Her research, carried out in Australia,
highlights several factors as indicative of this shift, including: young women’s initiation
of sex, their planned loss of virginity, the stating of conditional terms of relation-
ships, their participation in casual sex, their efforts to ensure their own sexual pleasure
is catered for, their refusal of unwanted sex and their insistence of condom use. She
argues that ‘in each of these areas, the conventional gendered imperatives are
challenged and the gendering of masculine and feminine behaviour becomes less
certain’ (1999, p. 277). Her research reveals, she concludes ‘a clear rejection of passive,
traditional femininity’ and a capacity to renegotiate ‘the status quo of hegemonic or
institutional heterosexuality’.
Empowering women, especially in post-colonial and developing countries, is
clearly crucial in HIV/AIDS prevention, and vice versa, and has been cited as one of
the most important strategies in slowing down the AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan
and West Africa (Therborn, 2004). However, the different contexts in which young
women are exhorted to embark on HIV/AIDS risk reduction behaviours and the
difficulties involved have been relatively neglected in research and policy terms.
Augustine Ankomah (1999) has highlighted the relative powerlessness of young
women in premarital sexual exchange relationships in urban Ghana for instance,
where many sexual encounters are contracted for material purposes. Ankomah argues
that women often engage in ad hoc ‘sexual exchange’ – where sexual services are
performed for economic purposes – for financial reasons, and that it is only by
improving women’s economic status and addressing contemporary societal norms
which support sexual exchange that women’s vulnerability can be alleviated.

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Conclusions

Sexuality has been a central political and theoretical issue for feminists, and also a
source of major divisions. The question of whether heterosexual sex is oppressive
to women, and whether heterosexuality is a tenable practice for feminists remains a
source of contention. Feminists have emphasised that heterosexuality does not have
the same meaning for all men and women, and this raises a number of questions about
the pleasures and powers of sexuality.
In this chapter, we have looked at three broad ways of conceptualising the
relationship between sexuality and the social. Generally speaking, these three per-
spectives themselves represent something of a sociological history of sexuality,
although it is important to note that although a social constructionist and then post-
structuralist approach have largely superseded a biological essences model in terms
of the development of sociological ideas, the contention that sexuality is a pre-social,
biological entity remains relatively dominant not only in the social sciences, but more
generally in medical, religious, moral, legal and media discourse on sexuality. In this
respect, one of the points that feminists have highlighted is that the distinction between
the biological and the social is far from unproblematic.
The idea of the family as the natural and normal site where sexual relations
take place has tended to privilege heterosexual relationships and to render deviant
any sexual relations that take place outside of this context. Although more people
now accept premarital sexual relations as normal, this also means that courting has
become sexualised and the ‘norm’ of sex between a man and a woman, sanctified
by romantic love, has been reinforced. In Victorian England women were not supposed
to enjoy sex at all and it was only men who were thought to have an uncontrollable
sex drive which impelled them to visit the many prostitutes who patrolled the streets.
From the 1920s ‘sexologists’ started to argue that sexual satisfaction was important
for both partners, and this became incorporated into ideas of what an ideal marriage
should be – a satisfying sexual partnership. However, this companionate sexuality
was defined according to masculine norms: women should enjoy penetrative sex
with men; if they did not then they were ‘frigid’. Furthermore, this whole discourse
reinforced the idea that heterosexuality was the natural, biologically determined human
relationship.
Sexuality more generally, however, continues to be defined in male terms.
Women’s bodies, conveying sexual promise, are presented as desirable and are used
to sell anything from cigarettes to spare parts for cars. We are constantly presented
with the idea of woman as sexually passive. Men are presented as sexually active and
predatory, at the mercy of their ‘uncontrollable lust’ which can be satisfied only by
penetrating women, whether the women are willing or not. Radical feminists have
argued that unwanted sexual advances by men could be construed as a form of rape
and that our society condones and indeed institutionalises rape. The sexual abuse of
women and girls in the home is likewise a product of the presentation of men as having
uncontrollable sexual appetities and women as victims of this, since most of the abusers
are men and most of the victims are female.
Also, as Jackson and Scott note, feminist debates on sexuality have been framed
largely by the ‘special’ status accorded to sexual relations in Western societies:

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Sexuality is conventionally singled out as a ‘special’ area of life: it has been

variously romanticized and tabooed, seen as a threat to civilization or the route
to social revolution, as a source of degradation and a means to personal growth.
. . . Sexuality may be feared as a source of dirt, disease and degradation, but it is
equally revered as a gateway to ecstasy, enlightenment and emancipation.
(Jackson and Scott, 1996, p. 26)

We would agree with their conclusion, in this respect and argue that feminism needs
to reflect critically on this ‘cultural obsession’ with sex, including the ways in which it
shapes feminist perspectives on sexuality, not least in terms of their essentialism and
ethnocentrism.

SUMMARY

1 Sociologists have argued that although sexuality is perhaps one of the

most intimate aspects of our lives, it is also social and political
(embedded within power relations), and that what we think of as sexual
varies historically, socially and culturally.
2 Three broad perspectives on sexuality can be identified in the social
sciences: essentialist, sociological and postmodernist.
3 Feminists have argued that sexuality is one of the key sites on which
patriarchal power relations are maintained; they have also argued that
sexuality can be a source of power for men and women to challenge
and resist patriarchal ideology and compulsory heterosexuality. Three
examples of ‘sexuality as resistance’ were considered: female
promiscuity, camp and the evolution of gay villages.
4 Black and post-colonial feminists have argued that white, Western
feminists have neglected racial and ethnic difference among women,
and have failed to challenge racist stereotypes regarding Black and
Asian women’s sexuality.

FURTHER READING

Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies.
Cambridge: Polity. This controversial text attempts to reflect on the meaning and impact of the
so-called ‘sexual revolution’ in Western societies, and considers connections between sexuality
and other aspects of social identity such as gender. Giddens argues that the transformation of
intimacy, in which he contends women have played a major part, holds out the possibility of a
radical democratisation of the personal sphere.
Hawkes, G. (1996) A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality. Buckingham: Open University Press. This
book offers a historical and sociological analysis of ideas about the expressions of sexual desire,
incorporating both primary and secondary historical and theoretical material. The major focus
of the book is on sexuality and modernity.

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Jackson, S. and Scott, S. (eds) (1996) Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press. This reader is a comprehensive and engaging selection of feminist contributions
to sexual theory and politics. It begins with an excellent overview of feminist debates and
tensions, and then considers feminist perspectives on essentialism and social constructionism,
sexual identities and categories, issues of power and pleasure and commercial sex. It contains
a range of classic and contemporary readings from a broad spectrum of feminist perspectives.
Weeks, J. (1986) Sexuality. London: Routledge. This book is an excellent starting point as it is a
short guide to the concept of sexuality, and to the political and theoretical debates that have
shaped its academic study particularly within sociology. It also considers the contribution of
feminist theory and politics.

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CHAPTER NINE

Work and organisation

Sociologists tend to divide people’s lives into ‘work’ (paid employment), ‘leisure’ (the
time when people choose what they want to do) and ‘obligation time’ (periods of sleep,
eating and other necessary activities). Feminists have pointed out that this model
reflects a male view of the world and does not necessarily fit the experiences of the
majority of women. This is partly because unremunerated domestic labour is not
recognised as work – it is ‘hidden’ labour – and partly because many women participate
in few leisure activities outside of the home. This is because, as we noted in Chapter
6, women and girls have the major responsibility for domestic labour. Whilst men
do more paid work than women, they also have more leisure time. It is not only the
organisation of work that is gendered but also the cultural values with which paid work
and domestic labour are associated; paid work and the workplace are largely seen
as men’s domain, the household as women’s. Rosemary Pringle sums up some of these
issues when she points out that,

Though home and private life may be romanticized, they are generally held to
represent the ‘feminine’ world of the personal and the emotional, the concrete
and the particular, of the domestic and the sexual. The public world of work
sets itself up as the opposite of all these things: it is rational, abstract, ordered,
concerned with general principles, and of course, masculine. . . . For men, home
and work are both opposite and complementary. . . . [For women] home is not
a respite from work but another workplace. For some women work is actually a
respite from home!
(Pringle, 1989, pp. 214–215)

Most of the classical sociological studies of paid work were of men – of coal
miners, affluent assembly line workers, male clerks, or salesmen for instance – and,
until relatively recently, the findings of these studies formed the empirical data on
which sociological theories about all workers’ attitudes and experiences were based.
Even when women were included in samples, it was (and sometimes still is) assumed
that their attitudes and behaviours differed little from men’s, or married women were
seen as working for ‘pin money’; paid employment being seen as relatively secondary
to their domestic roles.
A growing body of feminist and pro-feminist research has challenged these
assumptions, however, and has provided sociologists with a more detailed under-
standing of the relationship between gender, work and organisation, and particularly

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of how men’s and women’s experiences of work differ. Feminists have argued that
domestic labour is work and should be regarded as such. They have also maintained
that the majority of women do not undertake paid employment for ‘pin money’ but out
of necessity, and that paid work is seen as meeting important emotional and identity
needs by many women. This does not mean that women’s experiences of paid
employment are the same as men’s, however, and feminists have highlighted a range
of ways in which work is gendered.
In the UK, for instance, 46 per cent of people in the labour market are women.
However, 44 per cent of women and only 10 per cent of men in employment work part-
time. Average hourly earnings for women working full-time are 18 per cent lower, and
for women working part-time are 40 per cent lower, than for men working full-time.
Of mothers of under fives, 52 per cent are in employment, compared with 91 per cent
of fathers of under fives. There are 4.5 children aged under 8 for each registered place
with a childminder, in full day care or in out of school clubs. Modern apprentices in
hairdressing and in early years care and education are mainly women, while those
in construction, engineering and plumbing are mainly men. Women are by far the
majority in administrative and secretarial (80 per cent) and personal service jobs
(84 per cent), while men hold most skilled trades (92 per cent) and process, plant and
machine operative jobs (85 per cent) (EOC, 2004). Feminist sociologists have sought
to explain these patterns with reference to a range of concepts, particularly the sexual
division of labour.

Gender ideology and the sexual division of labour

All societies seem to have a division of labour based on sex – work that is seen as
women’s work and work that is seen as men’s work; labour is gendered. However, the
nature of the work that is done by men or women varies from society to society and
changes historically. Clearly, the sexual division of labour is embedded not only
in relations of sexual difference (in the relationship between men and women), but
also within racial and ethnic differences, in global power relations, in systems of age
stratification, in social class, and so on. In almost all societies the care of babies and
young children is seen as women’s work, but in many societies men take on the task
of caring for young boys, in others older children generally look after young ones, and
in others older women tend to care for the children. Cooking is mainly seen as women’s
work, except the preparation of feasts and ceremonial meals which is frequently seen
as men’s work. In many but not all societies hunting and fishing are regarded as men’s
work (and in some societies as men’s leisure activities), but women frequently under-
take planting and harvesting either alone or alongside men. In many societies women
are responsible for the care of livestock. Ann Oakley (1982) has suggested that the
sexual division of labour is socially constructed, and not based on natural biological
differences. Jobs become identified as men’s work or women’s work; then it is argued
that men and women do these jobs because of natural biological differences.
In Western societies, following industrialisation, work became separated from
the home, and work done in the public sphere – paid work – became more highly
valued than unpaid work in the domestic sphere. Women became seen as those who

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were ‘naturally’ good at domestic work and caring, and men as the providers – those
in paid employment in the public sphere. Male trade unionists, employers and the state
were able to restrict women’s paid employment and exclude them from certain
occupations. Consequently, men were able to define the conditions and rules of the
game, so that for women to succeed in the male-dominated world of paid work, it
became necessary for them to play by the same rules. Often, for instance, in order to
have a career, to be seen as worthy of employment, training or promotion, women
have to be prepared to work full-time and to have no breaks in their career for having
and raising a family. Even then, women are likely to be excluded from many aspects
of the culture of the workplace and from its more informal aspects. Women in paid
work also tend to maintain responsibility for domestic labour and so carry out a ‘double
shift’. For those women who also provide care for an elderly or dependent relative,
this might be increased to a ‘triple shift’ (see Chapter 5). Research suggests that one
in six people in the UK are currently caring for an elderly or dependent person and
that women are more likely than men to provide care; of those, 26 per cent also have
dependent children (EOC, 2004). Hence, both the structure and the culture of paid
work can serve to disadvantage women. Feminists have long since highlighted the
importance of women undertaking paid work as a means of achieving some degree
of independence. Women are often refused training, however, or are recruited on the
assumption that they will take extended career breaks (because their main role is as
wives and mothers) in a labour market that continues to define continuous, full-time
employment as the norm. In manual work, ‘skill’ is socially constructed in gender terms,
so that jobs that involve tasks associated with masculine expertise – such as driving
– are seen as more skilled than jobs deemed to involve feminine dexterity – such as
sewing, for instance.
Both men and women often believe that work is less important for women
than for men and that men should have higher wages and more secure employment
because of their responsibility for supporting the family. Men are seen as ‘breadwinners’
whereas women are seen as domestic carers. Feminists have argued that there is
no inherent, pre-social reason why this should be the case. It would be quite possible
for men and women to be seen as equally responsible for the economic support of
the household and for the necessary domestic labour and childcare. Indeed, there is
a gap between the ideology that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ and the reality
for many women who have paid employment. However, this ideology still has real con-
sequences for many women, particularly married women with children; most assume,
as do their husbands, employers and the state, that even if they have paid employment
they are still solely or primarily responsible for childcare and domestic labour.
This ideology is so pervasive, so much a part of taken-for-granted assumptions, that
it is rarely questioned or challenged (even though it might be parodied in TV
advertisements or situation comedies).
Gender ideology has important consequences for the type of work that many
women with children seek and are offered. It influences the type of occupations that
young women enter on leaving full-time education, not only because of their own
aspirations but also what career advisers, their parents, school and employers see as
suitable for them (see Chapter 4). While it is the case in many of the former Communist
societies that married women had full-time employment, they were nevertheless still

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expected to do the bulk of unpaid domestic labour and were generally in jobs paid at
a lower rate than men’s (see Einhorn, 1993; Khotkina, 1994; Voronina, 1994).
Employers clearly have views of what is appropriate work for women, and women
often share these views. Many ‘female’ occupations are clearly regarded as using the
‘natural’ abilities women require in the domestic sphere – caring for young children,
nursing, preparing and serving food, and so on. Much of the growth in part-time
work in many Western societies is dependent on the needs of women with domestic
responsibilities to take on paid employment even if the pay is low and the conditions
of employment relatively poor. Feminists have argued that many of the assump-
tions underpinning the sexual division of labour are not only grounded in structural
inequalities that disadvantage women, but also cultural assumptions about women’s
‘nature’ and ways of life which are empirically unsustainable. Not all women marry.
Not all women who marry have children. Not all women with children are married.
Many (including some married women, and women who have children) have a lifelong
commitment to paid work. Many women work out of economic necessity; their families
would be in poverty without their additional income.

Industrialisation and the gendered organisation of work

An analysis of some of the historical aspects of gender and work reveals a complex
relationship between work in the home and in the labour market. In pre-industrial
societies there was no clear separation between work and the home; economic pro-
duction was not concentrated in factories, offices and other places of employment.
Most people worked in or near their home. Nor was there a gendered separation
between productive work and unproductive work. All work was seen as contributing
to the maintenance of the household, although some tasks were seen as men’s and
some as women’s. However, with the industrial revolution, paid employment became
separated from the home – in factories, offices, and so on. Production and consump-
tion, productive and unproductive (domestic) work became separated, and gradually
men became associated with the former and women the latter. Women were largely
excluded from paid work, and it became seen as ‘natural’ for women, or at least married
women, to stay at home and care for their children and husbands. (Many nineteenth-
century and some early twentieth-century feminists accepted this and argued for
women having a choice – the choice between paid employment and marriage.) What
aroused concern in the nineteenth century was not whether or not women should
work – women’s work in the domestic sphere and the home caused relatively little
concern. It was the public appearance of wage-earning working women that produced
hostile comments. Working wives and mothers in particular were regarded as un-
natural, immoral and negligent homemakers and parents, in all but the poorest of
families. They were also accused of taking work from men.
This concern was underpinned by a developing domestic ideology which was
formed among the middle classes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
and which gradually spread to all classes and to both sexes (see Chapter 6). This
ideology maintained that the world was divided up into two separate spheres – the
public and the private. Men should be involved in the public sphere of work and politics,

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making money and supporting their families (Davidoff et al., 1976). Women should
stay at home in the domestic sphere, caring for their children and husbands and
dependent on their husbands for financial support.
Although many single and even married working-class women had to work, by
the end of the nineteenth century they would not have expected to be lifelong workers
and generally shared the domestic ideal of the middle classes. Married women believed
that their primary commitment was to their families and worked only when it was
essential for the maintenance of the family; while 25 per cent of married women worked
according to the 1851 Census, this had fallen to 10 per cent by 1901. However, poverty
did drive many married women into paid work, and it is estimated that in the period
1890 to 1940, when the Census recorded 10 per cent of married women as working,
40 per cent worked at some time during their married lives. It is also probable that
the Census underestimated women’s employment, partly because of the nature of it
– e.g. domestic service, taking in washing – and partly because of the increased status
of a man who earned enough to support his wife and children, so that men might have
been reluctant to record their wives as working on their Census return forms. However,
female participation in the labour market was quite high because the majority of single
women worked and they comprised as many as one in four women at some points
in the nineteenth century. In 1871, 31 per cent of women aged over 10 years were in
employment, and in 1931, 34 per cent of women over 14 were in employment. (The
school leaving age was 10 in 1871 and 14 by 1931.)
Industrialisation had two main consequences for the gendered organisation of
work. First, there was a bifurcation of social spheres, which separated the public world
of work from the private arena of the family and the household. The effect of gender
ideology was to designate the former the realm of men, the latter the world of women.
Second, gender ideology also established patterns of labour market segmentation which
concentrated those women who did engage in paid work in a relatively narrow range
of occupations, and at the lowest levels of the occupational hierarchies. By the end of
the nineteenth century women had become segregated into a small range of low-paid,
low-status occupations. The low pay of women at this point in time is partly explained
by the comparative youth of female workers, as most women gave up employment
on marriage (this was a formal requirement of many occupations, such as teaching).
The male trade unions kept women out of higher-paid jobs and fought for a family wage
for men – that is, one sufficient for the support of a non-working wife and children.
Patriarchal trade union practices, particularly those concerned with the maintenance
of a ‘family wage’, therefore served to close down labour market opportunities for
women (Witz, 1992). Even when women did the same work as men they did not receive
equal pay. Equal pay for male and female teachers, for instance, was not fully imple-
mented until 1962. The state also played a role in ‘creating’ occupational segmentation
and making men more desirable as employees. Restrictive legislation, supposedly
introduced to protect women, also excluded them from certain occupations and
restricted the hours they could work. The Mines Act of 1884 for instance forbade
women to work underground, but women were still able to work above ground as
pit-brow girls. The protection afforded by legislation did not extend to housework, or
to domestic servants however, or to preventing women doing dirty and dangerous
work (in agriculture, for example).

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Most men saw working women and especially married women as a threat to their
own paid employment and status as breadwinners. They argued that there was only
a limited amount of paid employment, and if women were allowed to work then some
families would be left without an income. Women were also thought to lower the level
of wages for both men and women, because they could be paid less than men.
Consequently, it was argued that women should be excluded from paid employ-
ment or confined to low-status, low-paid jobs – ‘women’s work’. But women’s work is
not just work that is seen as fit only for women; it also involves jobs that women are
thought to be naturally skilled at, such as cooking, cleaning and sewing. Hence, gender
ideology segregates the labour market not only by pushing women out of certain types
of work, but also by pulling them into others (particularly low-paid, low-skilled ‘service’
work).
Most trade unions have historically been dominated by men, and continue to be
so. Consequently, they have tended to be concerned with protecting men’s wages and
working conditions. Until relatively recently, women were prevented or discouraged
from joining a trade union, and in any case trade unions were seen by many women
as not concerned with representing their interests. Thus it could be said that protective
legislation was designed as much to protect male workers from female competition
as to protect women from the rigours of work. Not all women accepted this uncritically,
however.
By the early twentieth century women at all levels fought for the right to participate
equally with men in paid employment. Women, for example, fought for the right to
go to university and qualify as medical doctors. Women formed their own trade unions
and fought against the conditions of their employment. A notable example of this
is the so-called Match Girls’ Strike. However, on the whole, men, the trade unions and
the state succeeded in creating a segregated labour market, and the domestic ideology
was generally accepted by the end of the nineteenth century by men and women in
all social classes. Although women worked in large numbers during the First World
War, they accepted that after the war men should have priority in the labour market.
Many employers, including banks and the government, operated a marriage bar,
so that women had to give up employment on marriage; the marriage bar on female
teachers was not removed until the 1944 Education Act. Since the Second World War
increasing numbers of women have taken on paid employment, especially married
women (both despite and perhaps also because of, post-war domestic ideology and
consumer culture).
However, despite equal pay and equal opportunities legislation, a segregated
labour market still persists and domestic ideology is pervasive in the UK and in other
Western societies. Furthermore, women are still expected to take on the ‘double
burden’ of paid work and responsibility for domestic labour (see Chapter 6).

The gendered division of domestic labour

Feminists have argued that understanding women’s role as unpaid domestic workers
is crucial to understanding their social position more generally, and particularly their
role in the labour market. However, it is only relatively recently that housework has

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become a topic of serious academic concern. Functionalist sociologists argued that it

was necessary for women to undertake the physical and mental servicing of men and
children in complex industrial societies, and that it was socially functional for men and
women to divide the roles of homemaker and breadwinner according to gendered
dispositions. Marxists argued similarly that this was necessary in capitalist societies;
women were responsible for the reproduction of labour power and for consuming
the goods and services produced by the capitalist economy. While Marxists and
functionalists both argued that domestic labour was a private ‘labour of love’, Marxists
pointed out the ways in which it ensured that there was a continuing supply of well-
serviced workers to meet the demands of capitalism.
The view that domestic labour is the responsibility of women is also widely held
by many people – although this may be changing slowly. A comparative study of
Europe (Deshormes LaValle, 1987) found that 41 per cent of those interviewed said
that men and women should have equal roles in the home and in paid employment,
and 47 per cent of married men said they would prefer a working wife. Of course,
wanting a wife in paid employment does not necessarily indicate a willingness to share
in domestic labour. Despite an increased participation of men in domestic work,
women retain the responsibility for most work in the home (see Chapter 6).
Feminists have examined what housewives actually do and developed theories
that explain the relationship of housework to the social structure and the economy in
general. Most feminists agree that housework is hard, physically demanding work
and that the notion of being ‘just a housewife’ has developed because housework is
hidden from public view and done out of affection and duty rather than for payment.
Crucially, feminists have examined the sexual division of labour in the domestic sphere
and have defined women’s unpaid activity within the home as work. Research by
Hannah Gavron (1966), Ann Oakley (1974a, b), Jan Pahl (1980) and others rigorously
analysed what work was done in the domestic sphere, for whom, to whose benefit and
at whose cost.
This research found that the majority of ‘housewives’ were women. Housework
is usually seen as women’s work and it is assumed that women will do it if they live
in the household. The general assumption, this research found, is that women have a
natural aptitude for domestic tasks, while men do not. Furthermore, Oakley (1974a)
argued that the refusal to acknowledge that housework is work is both a reflection and
a cause of women’s generally low social status. She points out that housework is largely
underrated, unrecognised, unpaid work that is not regarded as ‘real’ work. However,
domestic labour involves long hours of work: in 1971, in Oakley’s sample, women did
77 hours a week on average. The lowest was 48 hours, done by a woman who also
had a full-time job, and the highest was 105 hours (Oakley, 1974a).
Domestic labour is seen by feminists, then, as real work. Feminists also argue that
the demands of housework and the economic and personal conditions under which it
is performed mitigate against the formation of a sense of solidarity amongst women.
Domestic labour is a solitary activity, and women are bound to housework by ties of
love and identification. Women like to feel reasonably good about their domestic work;
in the absence of clear standards or the praise of employers, women tend to use other
women as the standard against which to measure their own performance in a com-
petitive way. Housework consequently tends to divide women rather than unite them.

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As feminists have also argued, it has significant consequences for women’s role in the
labour market.

Explaining the domestic division of labour

Feminists argue that all men derive benefit from the expectation that women will
perform domestic labour. Gender ideology reinforces the belief that men work to earn
a living, and expect not only an income from their employment but personal service
from a wife (or mother) at a cost to themselves of less than the market value of the
goods and services provided. Christine Delphy (1984), from a materialist (Marxist-
derived) perspective, argues that gender inequalities are a result of the ways in which
husbands appropriate their wives’ labour. The wife does not receive an equitable return
for the domestic labour and childcare she provides. Delphy argues not only that
domestic labour is work just as much as factory labour is work, but also that it is
provided in a distinct ‘mode of production’ – the domestic mode. In the domestic
mode of production the husband appropriates the labour power of his wife; in return
for the economic support provided by husbands, women are expected to provide
domestic services. The marriage contract is a labour contract she argues, the terms
of which only become fully apparent when it is alleged that the wife has failed to fulfil
her side of the bargain.
According to radical feminists men benefit from the unpaid labour of women in
the domestic sphere, and therefore have a vital interest in maintaining the sexual
division of labour. Consequently, men resist equal opportunities legislation, support
policies that protect men’s privileged position in the labour market and ‘allow’ their
wives to work – but still expect them to be responsible for housework and childcare.
The main beneficiaries of the domestic division of labour, sustained by patriarchal
ideology, are therefore men (both individually and as a group). Marxist feminists argue
that it is the capitalist system that benefits from the unpaid domestic labour of women.
Not only does women’s domestic labour reproduce the relations of production, but
it also contributes to the maintenance of tolerable living standards for men and may
reduce political pressure for radical change. Women expend considerable effort and
energy stretching the household income and maintaining the household’s standard
of living, sustained and encouraged by ideologies of ‘domestic science’ and ‘good
housekeeping’.
There are a number of problems with feminist perspectives on domestic labour,
however. The major problem with Marxist theories is that they fail to take account of
men’s interest in perpetuating women’s role as domestic labourers. Marxist theories
are also not able to account for why in non-capitalist societies it is still the case that
women are primarily responsible for the performance of domestic labour. Also,
domestic ideology and the domestic division of labour predates capitalism. Radical
feminists, on the other hand, tend to ignore the benefits that capitalism derives from
women’s domestic labour, and their accounts tend to be descriptive rather than
explanatory; reducing ‘patriarchy’ to both a description of, and an explanation for,
the domestic division of labour (see Pollert, 1996). Radical feminist perspectives are
also relatively static, and unable to account for social changes in the ways in which

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domestic responsibilities are shared and organised. Although substantial change has
been slow to occur, it is the case, for instance, that in many societies, the gendered
division of domestic labour is becoming more equitable; particularly in countries such
as Sweden and Denmark where large numbers of women work full-time and where
provision of childcare is at a relatively high level. Also, radical feminist approaches tend
to assume that it is only men who benefit from the unpaid labour of women, but other
groups (and society in general) also benefit, particularly from women’s unpaid caring
work.

Caring and support work

Many women are expected to care not only for their husbands and children but also
for other dependents, and in a voluntary capacity for people generally in the com-
munity. Women are also frequently seen as necessary to their husbands’ work role.
As Janet Finch (1983) has demonstrated, this extends beyond the wives of managers
and businessmen who are expected to entertain on behalf of their husbands. Men
in many occupations ‘need’ a wife, and the employer benefits from this labour. Finch
also notes that in many professional occupations, women often support or substitute
for their husbands in the more peripheral aspects of their work (in the case of clergy-
men, politicians, and so on). Goffee and Scase (1985) have suggested that wives
play a vital role in helping self-employed husbands, who are often heavily dependent
on the (unpaid) clerical and administrative work undertaken by their wives. Wives are
often forced to abandon their own careers to underwrite the efforts of the ‘self-made’
man. Furthermore, given the long hours self-employed men often work, many wives
are left to cope single-handedly with the children and domestic responsibilities. Sallie
Westwood and Parminder Bhachu (1988) have pointed to the importance of the labour
(unpaid) of female relations in Black and Asian business communities in the UK,
although they also emphasise that setting up a business may be a joint strategy of
husband and wife.
Women are also expected to care for elderly or dependent relatives (see Chapters
6 and 7). As we noted in Chapter 3, however, some feminists have developed a critique
of the concept of ‘care’ arguing that it detracts from the reciprocal nature of many
caring relationships. Other feminists have noted that policies of ‘community care’ (as
opposed to care in institutions) that have been advocated by successive governments
since the 1950s have a hidden agenda for women. Such policies, which often involve
closing down or not providing large-scale residential care, have frequently assumed
that women are prepared to take on the responsibility of caring. As we noted in
Chapters 6 and 7, research suggests that by far the majority of those people providing
care for elderly or dependent relatives, particularly those committed to providing care
on a long-term basis are women. While it is generally suggested that ‘the family’ should
care where possible, in practice this has often meant that it is the women in families
who provide care. It is generally assumed that caring is part of a woman’s role and that
women are natural carers.
Sally Baldwin and Julie Twigg (1991, p. 124) summarise the key findings of feminist
research on caring work and indicate that the work on ‘informal’ care demonstrates:

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• that care of non-spousal dependent people falls primarily to women;

• that it is unshared to a significant extent by relatives, statutory or voluntary agencies;
• that it creates burdens and material costs which are a source of significant
inequalities between men and women;
• that many women nevertheless accept the role of informal carer and indeed derive
satisfaction from doing so;
• that the reasons for this state of affairs are deeply bound up with the construction
of male and female identity, and possibly also with culturally defined rules about
gender appropriate behaviours.

When women (or men) are responsible for the performance of domestic labour
or are providers of care on an unpaid (and often unrecognised) basis, this has serious
consequences for their role in the labour market. What is at stake is not just the loss
of potential earnings or social status, or even the amount of labour required (although
the hours and commitment involved in some caring roles are considerably more than
those of a full-time job), but the fact that many women are ‘trapped’ in the domestic
sphere. Janet Finch and Dulcie Groves (1980) have argued that ideologies of domes-
ticity and policies of community care are incompatible with equal opportunities for
women because domestic and caring roles are in themselves full-time commitments.
Processes of labour market segmentation mean that many women cannot earn as
much as their husbands, making it economically unviable for men to give up work, or
for many women to earn enough to pay for childcare, and domiciliary or respite care.
Feminists have emphasised then that women’s role in the domestic sphere has serious
consequences for gender relations in the labour market.
Feminists have also drawn attention to another aspect of domestic labour; one
which is regarded as work and which is remunerated, albeit often at a relatively low
rate, and which involves middle-class men and women employing other (usually)
women to carry out their domestic work. Research suggests that cleaning and other
domestic work in private households is often performed by working-class women, by
older women, or by Black or Asian women (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003). Bridget
Anderson (2000) in her study of migrant domestic workers in five European cities
found that such work not only brought low pay and long hours, but could amount
to a form of ‘slavery’. Women from poor countries would often be asked to complete
an impossible list of tasks; they were expected to care for children and families, to
have very little time away from the home where they worked, and were treated in a
range of subservient ways. Often, they found it difficult to break away from the middle-
class family that ‘bought’ them and to enter the mainstream labour market.

Men, women and the labour market

There was a steady increase in women’s rate of participation in the labour market
in most Western societies during the course of the twentieth century. Familial ideo-
logy may see a woman’s primary role as that of wife and mother, but the majority
of women (including married women) in most societies have paid employment for
the majority of the years during which they are employable. As we noted above,

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however, with the process of industrialisation the labour market became, and remains,
highly gender segmented.

Occupational segmentation

Feminists have pointed out that the labour market is segmented both horizontally
and vertically. Horizontal segmentation means that women are segmented across the
labour market into a relatively narrow range of occupations. Vertical segmentation refers
to the way in which, within these categories, women tend to be concentrated in rela-
tively low-paid, low-status occupations. Both types of segmentation combine to
concentrate women in the lowest strata of a narrow range of jobs, particularly non-
manual, low-skilled service sector work in which women (across all ethnic groups)
tend to be over-represented. Feminists have also argued that within horizontal patterns
of segmentation, occupational segmentation means that men and women are often con-
centrated in different occupations within the same sector, and within those occupations
tend to perform different functions (even within the same job) – functional segmentation.
In her study of secretarial work, Rosemary Pringle (1989, 1993) has also described
a process of cultural segmentation in which, even when men and women do the same
job, that job is perceived or performed differently depending on the cultural conno-
tations of gender. In her study women who worked as secretaries were often thought
of as ‘office wives’ who could be expected to type, make tea, collect dry cleaning and
remember birthdays and anniversaries and so on on behalf of their boss. The men who
worked as secretaries (and only relatively small numbers of men do), tended to be
thought of (and perform the job) as ‘personal assistants’ or ‘diary managers’.
Furthermore, the work that women do is less likely to be seen as skilled than the
work that men do (Phillips and Taylor, 1980), partly because women are thought to
possess the attributes necessary to perform it as a result either of their feminine nature
or their gendered experience of socialisation. Feminists have argued that some types
of ‘women’s work’ are essentialised, that is socially constructed according to the skills
associated with women’s biological role as actual or potential mothers – e.g. nursing,
primary schoolteaching; or according to women’s bodies – women are thought to be
naturally good at sewing or typing because of their ‘nimble fingers’ for instance. Many
of these jobs are also imbued with racist or ethnocentric assumptions – airlines which
advertise routes to the Far East for instance often emphasise the ‘natural’ servility and
attentiveness of Malaysian or Thai air ‘hostesses’ (assumptions that manifest them-
selves also in sex tourism – see Chapter 8). Other types of work are feminised, that
is defined according to the characteristics women are thought to have acquired socially,
as a result of their gendered experience of socialisation and education for instance, or
as a result of their social roles. Examples of feminised work might include secretarial
work in which women are thought to be capable of organising, managing and multi-
tasking – effectively working as ‘office wives’ – on behalf of their boss (Pringle, 1989).
Feminist research has also highlighted that certain types of work are sexualised, that
is defined according to an ideology of heterosexuality and the idea that a certain level
of sexual interaction and banter with male customers and colleagues should be expected
or encouraged as part of the work role. Lisa Adkins’s (1995) study of the hospitality

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industry in Britain and Diane Kirkby’s (1997) study of Australian barmaids are both
examples of work in sexualised occupations. The latter emphasises how the
sexualisation of barmaids

has been part of that culture of enjoyment that has mystified and obscured the skills
demanded of the workers while simultaneously rendering their workplace a space
for sexualised encounters they have had both to repel and attract.
(Kirkby, 1997, p. 205)

As the figures in Table 9.1 indicate, men and women in the UK continue to
be concentrated in a relatively narrow range of occupational sectors, a pattern that
is common across many societies. From these figures we can discern that women are
concentrated in a narrower range of occupations than men, and particularly those
involving semi-skilled or unskilled non-manual work in the service sector, or in caring
work. Women are by far the majority of cleaners and domestic workers, retail cashiers
and checkout operators, general office assistants and clerks, primary and nursery
schoolteachers, care assistants, hairdressers, nurses and receptionists. Men are spread
across a broader range of occupations, and are the majority of drivers, security guards,
software professionals, ICT managers, police officers, marketing and sales managers,
and IT technicians. They are also the majority of medical and legal professionals,
although this gap is narrowing. Men are notably under-represented in caring work,
and are concentrated in jobs deemed to involve a high level of training and skill, and
also in areas of work that involve exercising authority over others. Most of the jobs in
which men are concentrated are carried out either on a full-time basis, or in areas of
work that involve shift work (which often carry a premium rate of pay), whereas many
of the occupations in which women are employed are associated with relatively low
pay; they are relatively low status, often do not involve employer investment in training
or have clear promotion structures, and are often carried out on a part-time basis.
As well as being concentrated in a relatively narrow range of service sector
occupations, women are also over-represented in part-time work. Vertical segmen-
tation means that women are also under-represented in the most senior levels
of particular occupations. In the UK, women currently make up only 36 per cent of
senior public appointments, 23 per cent of top management posts in the Civil Service,
12 per cent of university vice-chancellors, 7 per cent of senior police officers, and
1 per cent of senior officers in the armed forces (EOC, 2004).

Gendered patterns of work

The increased labour market participation of women does not mean that women’s
experiences of work are the same as men’s, or that their working patterns are the same.
Employed mothers are concentrated in an even narrower range of occupations and
sectors of the labour market than women in general; a pattern that is consistent across
many countries throughout the world. The type of work, the hours that women work
and the return that they receive for their labour all differ from men’s. Even where
women are employed in the same occupation as men and have equal pay, their

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Table 9.1 Occupational segmentation of employees and self-employed (aged 16 and over),
UK, 2003

Selected occupations Women Men

No. (000) % of No. (000) % of
occupation occupation

Taxi/cab drivers 14 8 168 92

Security guards 18 12 134 88
Software professionals 38 14 241 86
ICT* managers 40 16 207 84
Police officers up to sergeant 34 22 123 78
Marketing and sales managers 122 25 359 75
IT operations technicians 36 32 77 68
Medical practitioners 60 39 95 61
Solicitors, lawyers,
judges and coroners 49 42 69 58
Shelf fillers 73 48 80 52
Chefs and cooks 115 49 117 51
Secondary teachers 197 55 161 45
Sales assistants 905 73 343 27
Waiters and waitresses 143 73 54 27
Cleaners and domestic
workers 469 79 121 21
Retail cashiers and checkout
operators 238 82 52 18
General office assistants and
clerks 495 83 102 17
Primary and nursery
schoolteachers 289 86 48 14
Care assistants and home
carers 480 88 66 12
Hairdressers and barbers 133 89 17 11
Nurses 418 89 50 11
Receptionists 255 96 12 4

Source: Labour Force Survey, cited in EOC, 2004.

Note: * Information and Communication Technology.

experiences may differ greatly from men’s. However, women and men are frequently
concentrated in different jobs, often with men supervising or controlling women.
Women often work part-time (44 per cent of all working women in the UK work on a
part-time basis), while the vast majority of men work full-time (90 per cent). Men tend
to work part-time either early or late in their working lives: 46 per cent of men who
work part-time in the UK are aged 16–24 and 28 per cent are aged 55 or over, whereas
women work part-time at all ages: 49 per cent of women part-time workers are aged
35–54 (EOC, 2004). As the figures in Table 9.2 indicate, women are over-represented
among part-time workers throughout all age groups.
As a result of their concentration in part-time work, women often do not enjoy
the same conditions of employment as men, or even the protection of employment
legislation. Women who work part-time are often not only without fringe benefits;

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Table 9.2 Part-time employees (aged 16 and over), UK, 2003 (% of full-time employees)

Age group Women Men

No. (000) % No. (000) %

16–24 790 45 534 29

25–34 861 33 115 4
35–44 1,408 47 86 3
45–54 1,067 42 106 4
55–64 758 56 199 13
65 and over 123 89 123 69
All ages 5,007 44 1,163 10

Source: EOC, 2004.

they also lack seniority and are unlikely to be promoted, and this is often the case
for part-time professional and managerial employees as well as those further down
the occupational hierarchy. In addition, women are more likely than men to be doing
‘homework’ – producing industrial goods at home – on piece-rates that often work out
at extremely low wages. It is thought that there is anything up to half a million
homeworkers in Britain, although it is impossible to estimate precise numbers because
much of this work is subcontracted or concealed.
Women’s labour market participation is clearly affected by their domestic
responsibilities. It is not so much marriage as having dependent children that condi-
tions gendered patterns of work; in all ethnic and occupational groups, having children
has a considerable impact on women’s labour market position. Many women with
young children tend to withdraw temporarily from the labour market, returning
to part-time work when the children reach school age and to work full-time when the
children are older. Yet not only do a high proportion of women return to paid employ-
ment after having children, but many return between births, and the time that women
are taking out of the labour market for childbirth and childrearing is decreasing. Women
are spending an increased proportion of their lives in employment, though relatively
few have continuous full-time careers because of their domestic responsibilities.

Table 9.3 Male and female employees working full- or part-time, UK, 2003 (%)

Full-time Part-time All

Single men 87 13 100

Married men 94 6 100
No children 92 8 100
With child 0–4* 97 3 100
With child 5+* 97 3 100
Single women 67 33 100
Married women 48 52 100
No children 58 42 100
With child 0–4* 32 68 100
With child 5+* 42 58 100

Source: EOC, 2004.

Note: * age of youngest child.

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In the UK, women whose youngest child is aged under 5 have lower rates of
full-time working than other women. About a third (32 per cent) of women with a child
aged 0–4 work full-time, compared with 42 per cent of women with older children, and
58 per cent of women without dependent children (see Table 9.3).
Research suggests that there are significant gender differences in men’s and
women’s reasons for working part-time (see Table 9.4). The most common reasons
given by women are related to their family or domestic situation. In total, 54 per cent
of female part-time employees told the Labour Force Survey in Spring 2003 (cited in
EOC, 2004) that they wanted to spend more time with their family, had domestic
commitments which prevented them from working full-time, or felt there were
insufficient childcare facilities available to them. Only 5 per cent of male part-time
employees stated that their reason for working part-time was related to their family
or domestic situation. Instead, the most common response was that they worked part-
time because they were also studying (44 per cent). The next most common reasons
were that they couldn’t find a full-time job (17 per cent) or that they had no need to
work full-time (14 per cent). Another way of viewing these figures is to take each
response in turn and calculate what percentage of respondents giving that reply were
women (the last column in the table shows these percentages) (EOC, 2004). Although
more than four-fifths (82 per cent) of part-time employees were women, almost all (98
per cent) of those citing family or domestic reasons were women, whilst only 55 per
cent of those working part-time because they were students were women. Women also
comprised fewer than two-thirds of those working part-time because they were ill or
disabled (60 per cent), or who could not find a full-time job (63 per cent).

Table 9.4 Part-time employees (aged 16 and over) by reason for working part-time,
UK, 2003

Reason Women Men Women as

No. (000) % of all No. (000) % of all a % of all
women men

Studying 602 12 499 44 55

Ill or disabled 67 1 44 4 60
Unable to find full-time job 319 6 189 17 63
Did not want full-time, of which:
No need to work full-time 536 11 158 14 77
Family or domestic reasons 2,679 54 55 5 98
Other reasons 802 16 181 16 82

All part-time employees 5,005 100 1,125* 100 82

Source: EOC, 2004.

Note: * discrepancy in total is due to rounding.

Similarly, the majority of those who job share and engage in term-time working
are women. ‘Job-sharing’ is a type of part-time work in which a full-time job is usually
divided between two people. The job-sharers work at different times, although there
may be a changeover period. Term-time workers work during the school or college
term and take (usually a combination of) paid or unpaid leave during the school

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holidays, although their pay may be spread evenly over the year. Many more women
than men job-share or have term-time working arrangements in the UK. Overall, 91
per cent of job-sharers and 84 per cent of term-time workers are women (EOC, 2004).
However, only a small proportion of women who work (1.6 per cent and 8.2 per cent
respectively) either job-share or have a term-time working arrangement. The compara-
ble figures for men are much lower. Only 1.4 per cent of male employees in the UK have
a term-time working arrangement and 0.2 per cent currently job-share (EOC, 2004).
The pattern of women’s paid employment across the life course is changing in
all European societies, but there are clear differences between countries. Denmark
and Portugal are the two countries where female participation most nearly matches
the ‘Inverted U’ curve – that is, the majority of women do not take ‘career breaks’
– although participation rates are higher in Denmark. In France, the UK, Germany and
the Netherlands, the activity pattern of women most clearly resembles the ‘M-shaped’
curve, with a high proportion of women having a career break, although the Netherlands
has a higher rate of participation among women aged 40–50 than the other three
countries. In other countries such as Italy, Spain, Greece, Ireland and Belgium, despite
an increase in female economic activity rates, there continues to be a peak in female
employment at about age 25 and a decline thereafter.
Although the availability of childcare (and out-of-school care for those of primary-
school age) is a factor in explaining women’s varied participation in paid employment,
it is not by itself a sufficient explanation. Ireland and the Netherlands, for example,
have significantly more places for pre-school children in publicly funded care than
the UK, but much lower employment rates for women aged 25–49; 45 and 58 per cent
respectively (compared with 73 per cent in the UK in 1992) – see Maruani (1992).
However, it is clear that the availability of childcare is a significant factor in enabling
women to participate in the labour market. In France, for example, the almost universal
availability of pre-school publicly funded childcare, combined with long school hours,
has meant that large numbers of French mothers work full-time. By contrast, in Britain
the relatively low level of pre-school provision and a short school day accounts, in part
at least, for both the continuing ‘M-shaped’ pattern of the female activity-rate curve
and for the high level of part-time employment of women with children. It is also likely
that the provision or not of childcare by the state interacts with cultural attitudes to
whether married women or women with children should participate in paid employ-
ment. The low employment rate of married women in Ireland, for instance, would
seem to be heavily influenced by cultural factors and gender ideology. A combination
of structural and cultural factors also explains the persistence of the gender pay gap.

The gender pay gap

The gender pay gap (the disparity between men’s and women’s earnings) has not
narrowed significantly in Britain since the introduction of the Equal Pay Act in 1970
(and its subsequent amendment in 1980 to include ‘equal pay for work of equal worth’).
There has been virtually no change in the full-time gender pay gap since the mid-1990s
(EOC, 2004). Women working full-time in Britain earned 81 per cent of the average
full-time earnings of men in 2003 – this meant that the pay gap in hourly earnings was

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Table 9.5 Gender pay gap, 2003 (%)

Hourly Weekly Annually

Women f/t and men p/t 18.8 25.4 27.8

Women p/t and men p/t 15.9 13.0 19.9
Women p/t and men f/t 41.1 72.0 72.3
All women and all men 23.9 41.4 43.8

Source: EOC, 2004.

19 per cent (see Table 9.5). Women working part-time earned only 59 per cent of the
average hourly earnings of men who worked full-time. This average gender pay gap
of 41 per cent has hardly changed since 1975 (EOC, 2004).
The gender pay gap is even wider in weekly earnings (25 per cent), and even more
so annually (28 per cent). This is because men tend to work longer hours than women
on average, and are more likely to receive additional payments such as shift pay
and bonuses. Men are also more likely to work overtime than women. The pay gap is
particularly wide for managers and administrators (30 per cent) and in sales occu-
pations (28 per cent), and narrowest in clerical and secretarial occupations (2 per cent).
There is, however, clear evidence that even when they are in the same occupations
and are working similar hours, women earn less than men; that there is a ‘gender
premium’. The gender pay gap for all employees is higher for those with dependent
children (31 per cent) than without (18 per cent). It is also higher amongst disabled
women who have lower than average earnings of men, regardless of working full- or
part-time.
The gap between men’s and women’s pay increases with age, and this is partly
because men’s average pay does not peak until they are in their fifties, whereas
pay for women peaks in their thirties (EOC, 2004). Young women tend to be better
qualified than older ones, which is part of the explanation also, although there is a wide
gender pay gap at every qualification level, including for graduates. Indeed, there is
a considerable difference between the average annual earnings of female and male
graduates in the youngest age group (20–24); EOC research has shown that in 2002–3,
earnings of men in the age group were on average 15 per cent higher than those of
women (EOC, 2004).
The gender earnings gap seems to be compounded in later life. Some 61 per cent
of male employees but only 53 per cent of women are members of one or more occu-
pational, personal or stakeholder pension schemes. Women are less likely to make
regular contributions to a pension than men; of those aged 25–59 in work in 2003, 44
per cent of men but only 26 per cent of women had made pension contributions in each
of the previous ten years (EOC, 2004). This, combined with an ageing population (see
Chapter 5), means that women are potentially at an increasing risk of poverty in
later life, as women’s disadvantaged labour market position throughout their working
lives is reflected in later life.
A research review by the Equal Opportunities Commission in the UK (EOC, 2001)
highlights women’s concentration in a narrow range of occupations and in part-time
work as two of the main factors contributing to the persistence of the gender pay gap.

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The report also emphasises that compared with other industrialised countries, women
in the UK suffer high earnings losses over the life course, particularly those who leave
work to raise children: ‘the high penalty reflects relatively weak maternity and parental
leave entitlement and limited childcare provision. This restricts opportunities for
continuity of employment, especially for low paid and low skilled mothers’ (p. 5).

Women’s orientations to work

Whereas most feminists argue that the major factors explaining women’s position
in the labour market and gendered patterns of work are structurally determined,
Catherine Hakim (1995, 1996) has argued that insufficient attention has been given to
women’s orientation to paid employment, and to their work commitment. In exploring
gendered patterns of labour market participation, she argues that there are three groups
of women:

1 Home-centred women (accounting for between 15 and 30 per cent of women) who
prefer not to work and whose main priority is children and family.
2 Adaptive women (accounting for between 40 and 80 per cent) who are a diverse
group including women who want to combine work and family, and those who
want to have paid employment but are not committed to a career.
3 Work-centred women (accounting for between 10 and 30 per cent of women) who
are mainly childless, and whose main priority is their career.

She develops what she calls ‘preference theory’, arguing that women can now choose
whether to have a career or not. She argues that the majority of women who combine
domesticity with employment (the ‘uncommitted’) seek part-time work even knowing
that it is concentrated in the lower grades and is less well remunerated than other
work. In contrast to feminist sociologists who have argued that women’s employment
patterns are the outcome of structural factors that limit women’s choices, the exclu-
sionary tactics used by men, or gendered ideologies, Hakim argues that women
positively choose low-paid, low-status part-time work that fits in with their domestic
and familial roles, which they themselves see as a priority.
However, Crompton and Le Feuvre (1996) argue that there is little empirical
evidence to support the view that there are such clear categories of women as far as
work commitment is concerned. They conclude this from their study of women in
banking and pharmacy employment in Britain and France and suggest that there is no
evidence, even when these professional women work part-time, to suggest that they
are not committed to their paid employment. Martin and Roberts (1984) in an earlier
study reported that although many women found it difficult to cope with the often
conflicting demands of work and home, this didn’t mean that they were any less com-
mitted to either. More central, in their study, was the relationship between type of
work, employment conditions and orientation to work. A further critique of Hakim’s
account is provided by Walsh (1999), in a study of part-time female workers in Australia.
Walsh argues that women who work part-time are not homogenous in terms of
their characteristics or orientations to work, and that there are a variety of reasons for
women seeking part-time work. Whilst a majority of women in her sample were

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content with their work circumstances, a substantial proportion wanted to return to

full-time work as soon as it was practical. She questions Hakim’s view that the majority
of female employees are not committed to a career and suggests that commitment to
the labour market varies between groups and over the life course. Rosemary Crompton
(1986) emphasised this latter point in her earlier discussion of service work, which
highlighted the role of the life course in shaping women’s orientation to work.
Finally, it is essential to remember that when women ‘choose’ to combine their
commitments to unremunerated work with paid employment, the choices they make
and their orientation to both are the outcome of a relatively narrow range of choices
and the socially constructed expectations of women’s roles and responsibilities. They
are also shaped by material factors such as social class inequalities, and racial and
ethnic power relations, as well as issues such as disability. For example, highly qualified
women in managerial and professional occupations can often earn enough to pay
for high-quality childcare and domestic help, and avoid the criticisms often directed
at working wives and mothers, while other women cannot; their orientation to work
is only part of the explanation for why this latter group of women may work part-
time or not at all. More sociological explanations for women’s working patterns and
orientations to work have emphasised, then, the importance of exploring the ways in
which structure and agency interrelate in order to understand the social construction
(and restriction) of ‘choice’.

Gender and unemployment

According to the Labour Force Survey (cited in EOC, 2004), 4 per cent of economically
active women (women who are aged 16 and over and available for work), and 6 per
cent of economically active men in the UK are unemployed. Traditionally in sociology,
unemployment has not been thought to pose a problem for women, or at least for the
majority of married women. This is because it is argued that women’s wages are
marginal, not essential to the family, that women’s main identity and status is derived
from their role as wives and mothers, and that women can ‘return’ to their primary
domestic role. Women’s unemployment is also ‘hidden’ in so far as a high proportion
of women seeking employment are not registered as unemployed.
However, feminist research has challenged this view and has argued that work and
work identities are central to many women’s lives and that the money women earn is
essential. Angela Coyle (1984), in a study of 76 women who were made redundant,
found that only three (two of whom were pregnant and one near retirement age),
took the opportunity to stop work. All the others sought alternative employment – and
found work that was less skilled, had poor working conditions and was less well
paid than their previous posts. The women said that they worked because a male
wage was inadequate for the needs of their household, and because they valued the
independence they gained from paid employment and having their own income. She
concludes that paid work was seen as central to the lives of these women, and that
redundancy was viewed as an unwelcome interruption to their working lives.
Reasons for non-employment vary considerably by gender. In the UK, the
main reason given in the 2001 Census for women not being economically active

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was that they were engaged in non-remunerated work (looking after a family or
home). The main reason for men was that they had been made redundant, were in full-
time education or training, or that a temporary job had come to an end. Only 4 per cent
of men were looking after a family or home (www.nso.org). Non-employment is
also, of course, connected to other factors such as level of qualification, disability and
ethnicity.
At the same time as the participation rate for women (albeit mainly in part-time
jobs) has been going up in many societies, it has been declining for men. This is partly
a result of high male unemployment rates, especially in Europe, and also because of
an increase in the number of men, especially in their fifties and sixties, on long-term
sick leave, taking early retirement or being made redundant. It is predicted that the
gender gap in employment activity (with more women’s jobs being created than men’s)
will continue to grow (Macionis and Plummer, 2002).
There are also gender differences in the activities that men and women undertake
whilst unemployed, as well as the ways in which they seek new jobs. Surveys from
several European countries, for instance, indicate that women find it more difficult
than men to find a new job after being unemployed, and that they are more likely to
rely on government services while men use more efficient methods such as personal
contacts and networks (www.unece.org). The informal aspects of work seem to dis-
advantage women, then, both when they are in work and when they are unemployed,
as many feminist studies of the workplace have revealed.

Feminist studies of the workplace

Many of the ‘classic’ feminist studies of work focused on factory workers (attempting
to redress the neglect of women in malestream sociological studies of work), but have
subsequently tended to focus more on sectors of the labour market in which women
are over-represented, principally care work and work in the service sector. These
studies have highlighted a range of ways in which gender shapes men’s and women’s
experiences of paid work.

Feminist studies of factory work

Studies by Anna Pollert (1981) and Sallie Westwood (1984) show women and men
working in separate occupations, with men employed in jobs classified as skilled
and women doing work classified as semi- or unskilled, and earning substantially less
than men. They all agree that ‘skill’ is socially constructed in such a way that it is seen
as a characteristic of men’s work and not of the work that women do. Ruth Cavendish
(1982), describing a London factory, notes that the complex skills expected of women
on the assembly line actually took longer to acquire than those of the male skilled
workers. She provides a graphic account of what it is like to do unskilled factory work.
The factory in which she worked employed around 1,800 people, of whom 800 worked
on the factory floor. Virtually all the women were migrant workers – 70 per cent were
Irish, 20 per cent African–Caribbean and 10 per cent Asian (mostly from Gujarat in

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India). She notes that the men enjoyed significantly better working conditions than the
women – their jobs enabled them to stop for an occasional cigarette, to move around
and to slow down without financial penalty, while the women were tied to the line.
Male-dominated trade unions and management worked together to protect the
interests of male workers. Men and men’s interests effectively controlled the women,
who were frequently supervised by men.
All the women were semi-skilled assemblers with very few exceptions. Men,
on the other hand, were spread throughout the grades and were divided from each
other by differences of skill and pay. Even in the machine shop where men and women
worked together on the same job the men were paid at a higher rate than the
women on the grounds that they could lift the heavy coils of metal and the women
could not. While young men were trained as charge hands, the young women were
not; the latter lacked the possibilities for promotion that were open to the former.
The women were controlled by the assembly line and the bonus system. The
views of the women workers were not sought when new designs and new machinery
were introduced. The women had no chance to move or think while they were working
and no time for a quick break, and if they could not keep up with the line they were
dismissed. At work, the women were controlled and patronised by the men, but other
women were generally supportive and friendly. The most important things in the
women’s lives appeared to be their family and home; the single women looked for-
ward to marriage and domesticity. All the women shared a general interest in a ‘cult
of domesticity’.
Anna Pollert (1981), in her study of a tobacco factory in Bristol, found similarly
that women’s work in the factory was routine, repetitive, low-grade work that would
not be done by men. The women thought that they should be paid less than the
men because they were committed to marriage and having children, whereas the men
had families to support. The women also thought that their work was inferior to the
men’s – less skilled and less important to the production process. Also, the women
thought that if they were paid the same as men they would price themselves out of paid
work.
The women accepted their relatively low pay therefore, partly because they
compared it with the wages of other female jobs. While they rejected the idea that
their place was in the home, they thought of themselves as dependent on men and
conceived of their pay as secondary to a man’s – even though two-thirds of the
workforce were young, single women. They saw marriage and a family as their ‘career’
and thought of themselves as at the bottom of the labour market both in class and
gender terms. The unmarried girls looked to marriage as an escape from low-status,
monotonous work (even though they worked alongside married women for whom
this had proved not to be the case). Val, one of Pollert’s informants, expressed this well:

Get married [laugh]. Anything’s better than working here. Well, most women get
married, don’t they? Not all of them work all their lives like a man. Put it this way,
I don’t want to work when I’m married. I don’t really believe in married women
working. Well. ’Cos there’s not much work anyway, and they ought to make room
for people what have got to lead their own lives.
(Pollert, 1981, p. 101)

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Heterosexual romance permeated the talk of the women on the shop floor. Appearance,
courting and marriage dominated the conversation and work was seen as temporary.
Among the married women, who all did the ‘double shift’ (worked as both housewives
and in paid employment), their main identity was as housewives.

Feminist studies of care work

Personal care work, such as that of care assistants and ‘home helps’, is predominantly
performed by women; indeed, these jobs have generally been created as women’s
jobs and are assumed to require the ‘natural’ abilities of women. Women working as
home helps, nursing auxiliaries, care assistants, and so on are employed in the female
‘peripheral’ labour market – low-status jobs with poor and insecure conditions of
employment. They are often supervised and controlled by other female workers who
have more secure employment in the ‘core’ labour market (Abbott, 1995).
Their client group is mainly elderly people (of which there are increasing numbers
in most Western societies – see Chapter 5). Care workers often work across intimate
bodily boundaries, and their work can be repetitive and emotionally draining, as well
as physically demanding. While many of the women undertaking this kind of work are
positive about it (Abbott, 1995), feminists have tended to see it as exploitative and
therefore to see the women who do it as exploited victims of capitalist, patriarchal
social structures. Yet, Hilary Graham (1991) has pointed out that feminists have tended,
unintentionally, to take on policy-makers’ definitions of care and to equate it with work
carried out in the domestic home, for relatives and family, involving obligations of love
and kinship. This, as she points out, has meant that they have ignored class and racial
factors that impact on care and care work and the ways in which paid domestic labour
in the private home results in a blurring of the boundaries between the domestic and
the public spheres. Feminists have also tended to ignore paid care work in residential
settings and the ways in which the structuring of work in these settings and the
meanings given to it also blurs the public/private distinction in ways that merely
transpose assumptions about women’s caring role in the home to their employment
in the public sphere.
Care work in both the private and the public sphere is principally women’s work.
It is not just that it is mainly women who undertake it, but that it is seen as naturally
women’s work (the skills involved are those that are culturally associated with women
and hence are often not recognised). Drawing on Bourdieu’s idea that certain forms
of ‘cultural capital’ are needed for certain occupations, Beverley Skeggs (1997) has
argued that for those women who want to work in occupations that involve caring,
femininity can be an asset in the labour market. However, this means that caring work
is often not remunerated as skilled work (see Abbott, 1995). It is also seen as work that
is ‘fit’ only for women to carry out, largely because it involves both physical and
emotional labour, as well as a concern with hygiene and health; in other words, it often
involves intimate contact with other people’s bodies. This designation of caring work
as ‘women’s work’ applies to much of the work that women do, both in the home and
in the labour market and, feminists have argued, is central to understanding the
relationship between the work that women do in both spheres. This applies particularly
to women’s work in the service sector, and in clerical work.

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Feminist studies of clerical work

In clerical work, women are often found in relatively low-paid jobs, with few career
prospects and benefits. Women are frequently recruited on the basis that they will
not be promoted, while men are recruited on the assumption that they will. Once in
employment, women are less likely than men to be offered structured work experi-
ences and the opportunity to study that would enable them to seek promotion and to
be seen as promotable. A study by Kate Boyer (2004) has found for instance that
the financial services sector works to create what she describes as ‘a system in which
men flow through and women function at fixed points’ (p. 201). As clerical work has
declined in status and the tasks it involves have become standardised, fragmented
and rationalised, so increasingly women have been recruited to office work. The
deskilling of office work is mediated for men by the possibility of promotion. While
women are recruited to the lowest grades, paid at lower rates and replaced by other
young women when they leave to have children, men, it is assumed, will be mobile out
of clerical work.
One of the major debates on social class in malestream sociology since the Second
World War has been whether or not clerical workers have been proletarianised – that
is, whether the pay, conditions of employment and nature of clerical work have become
comparable to manual workers. British sociologists, following a Weberian analysis
of class (see Chapter 3), have looked at the market situation, working conditions and
status of male clerical workers and argued that they are middle class because they
enjoy superior working conditions, are socially accepted as middle class and do not
identify themselves as working class (see Lockwood, 1958; Goldthorpe et al., 1969).
Braverman (1974) however, argued that clerical workers have been proletarianised and
that the feminisation of clerical work is part of this process. Reviving the debate,
Crompton and Jones (1984) argued that while female clerical work is proletarian,
men’s is not – primarily, they suggest, because male clerical workers have the
possibility of upward mobility out of clerical work. They suggest that this situation may
change as more women seek and are seen as potential candidates for promotion.
However, the view that female clerical workers are proletarian holds only if they are
compared with male manual workers. Martin and Roberts (1984) and Heath and
Britten (1984) argued that female clerical workers enjoy pay and conditions of work
more comparable to women in professional and managerial work than to women
employed in manual work, where few are in work defined as skilled.
One of the most important sociological studies of clerical work is Rosemary
Pringle’s (1989) Secretaries Talk, based on interviews with almost five hundred office
workers from a range of workplaces in Australia. Her analysis focused on the boss–
secretary relationship, and highlights the ways in which this relationship is shaped by
gender power relations. Adopting a largely Foucaldian perspective, Pringle examines
the ways in which secretaries negotiate these power structures, shaped by gender
and class, charting the changing roles and identities available to secretaries – from
‘office wife’ to ‘sexy secretary’ and ‘career woman’, and also the way these roles reflect
technological change. She concludes that, although a variety of strategies of power and
resistance are open to them, ‘gender and sexuality continue to be extremely significant
in the construction of secretaries’ (p. 26).

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Feminist studies of service work

Gendered patterns of occupational segmentation, at least in Western societies, mean

that by far the majority of women who engage in paid work are employed in the service
sector, largely in routine, non-manual interactive service work or ‘women’s work’.
Feminist studies of service work have identified a range of occupations in which the
skills, attributes and aesthetics associated with women are commodified – in nursing
(James, 1989), in waitressing and bar work (Hall, 1993a, b; Adkins, 1995), in the airline
industry (Hochschild, 1983; Tyler and Abbott, 1998; Tyler and Taylor, 1998; Williams,
2003) and in the betting and gaming industry (Filby, 1992), for instance. Elaine Hall’s
(1993a, b) study of waitressing, for example, highlights the performance of gendered
service styles and that ‘waiting on tables is defined as typical “women’s work” because
women perform it and because the work activities are considered as feminine’ (1993a,
p. 329). Her study found that men are expected to adopt a ‘formal’ style when they wait
on tables, whereas women are expected to be more ‘familial’, and that these differences
in expectations can be attributed to the gendered construction of the jobs themselves.
What she describes as positional gender stratification within the occupation itself
was shaped largely by three factors: the gendered meanings of waiting, the gendering
of job titles, and the gendering of uniforms. Combined, these factors meant that being
feminine was conflated with ‘giving good service’ (1993b, p. 452).
Mike Filby’s (1992) ethnographic study of three betting shops also highlighted the
relationship between gender and sexuality in shaping the work experiences of women
in service occupations, and particularly the ways in which this relationship is shaped
by employer and customer expectations. Filby argues that perceptions of good service
were shaped largely by whether or not customers were satisfied with ‘the figures, the
personality and the bums’ of female workers. He also highlights that both management
and customers expected female workers to engage in sexual banter with customers
as part of their work role so that ‘the line between selling the service and selling sexual-
ity in such activity is very thin’ (p. 37). In this respect, he concludes that: ‘This study
. . . indicates how much the operation of workplaces and the production of goods
and services depend on tacit skills and assumed capacities of sexualized, gendered
individuals’ (p. 38).
A more explicit focus on the relationship between masculinity and femininity
underpinned Gareth Morgan and David Knights’s (1991) study of ‘selling as a gendered
occupation’ (p. 183) in a medium-sized insurance company. Their research highlights
that women were largely excluded from the job of field sales representative partly
because of ‘protective paternalism’ (sales reps have to travel around by themselves,
and visit prospective clients), partly because women were thought not to be suited to
the ‘loneliness of selling’, and partly because they were thought to be less resilient than
men; ‘too sympathetic’ and ‘not hungry enough’ as some of the men in their research
put it. Also, managers were conscious of an ‘esprit de corps’ amongst the sales force
based on shared gender identity and thought that women might disrupt this. The role
of sales rep, they found, was constructed largely according to a particular vocabulary
associated with masculine characteristics; a masculine discourse that emphasised
aggression and high performance as the defining features of the job, qualities that the
(male) managers and (male) sales reps and (they assumed) potential customers, would

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not associate with women. Hence, ‘for all these reasons, . . . the task of selling itself
became bound up with the masculinity of the sellers’ (p. 188). This meant that internal
sales (in banks and building societies) became feminised, whereas the external sales
force was predominantly male dominated. A similar finding emerged from research
by Kate Boyer (2004) on the financial services industry in Canada.
These gender differences in the nature of service work, and in the ways in which
particular roles are constructed according to gender ideologies, have also been studied
in police work. Susan Martin (1999), in her study of police officers in the USA found
that police work involves high levels of emotional interaction, and that officers
must control their own emotional displays and also the emotions of members of the
public with whom they come into contact who may be injured, upset, angry or under
suspicion. She argues that police work is often viewed as masculine work involving
fighting crime, but that it also involves a more caring aspect, which officers often dis-
dain as ‘the feminine side of the job’. Her analysis emphasises the ways in which gender
is in part constructed through work and through the cultures of particular occupations
and work organisations.
Robin Leidner (1993) reaches a similar conclusion in her neo-Weberian study
of the routinisation of service work in Combined Insurance and McDonald’s, Fast Food,
Fast Talk. She argues that with regard to gender and interactive service work, one
of the most striking aspects of gender construction is that its accomplishment creates
the impression that gender differences in ‘personality, interests, character, appearance,
manner and competence’ are somehow natural. Hence, ‘gender segregation of work
reinforces the appearance of naturalness’ (p. 194). Rather, she maintains, gender is
constructed in part through work, yet

For the public, as well as for workers, gender segregation in service jobs con-
tributes to the general perception that differences in men’s and women’s social
positions are straightforward reflections of differences in their natures and
capabilities.
(Leidner, 1993, p. 211)

Many female jobs in the service sector are clearly regarded as using the abilities
women are thought to deploy in the private sphere: caring, preparing and serving
food, nursing, anticipating and responding to the needs of others, and so on. In short,
much of this work is thought to involve what US sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild
(1983) described in her book The Managed Heart as ‘emotional labour’ – work involving
the commodification of emotion, and associated largely with women’s capacity
to provide service and care.

Men doing ‘women’s work’

Feminist studies have also emphasised that underpinning occupational segmentation

and the gendered structure of the labour market is a culture of ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s
work’. As Joan Evans has noted in her research on male nurses:

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Men’s participation in nursing reveals that prevailing definitions of masculinity

have acted as a powerful barrier to men crossing the gender divide and entering the
profession. At extraordinary times such as war and acute nursing shortages, gender
boundaries are negotiable. For those men who have crossed over into nursing, a
gendered division of labour is evidenced by men nurses’ long-standing association
with mental health nursing and, more recently, with their disproportionate
attainment of masculine-congruent leadership and speciality positions.
(Evans, 2004, p. 321)

Women’s work, as we have already noted, is associated with low pay, low status
and less autonomy than men’s work, in part because of the interrelationship between
the structure and culture of work and of the attribution of the skills involved to women’s
nature or gender. Most ethnographic studies have focused either on women’s exclusion
from areas of work traditionally dominated by men, or sectors of the labour in which
women are concentrated. Men in non-traditional occupations have been relatively
neglected until relatively recently. However, over the past twenty years or so, the pro-
portion of women entering male-dominated occupations has begun to increase, but
not vice versa. In her book, Doing ‘Women’s Work’, Christine Williams (1993) explores
why men tend not to work in areas of the labour market associated with female
employment, and also what happens to those men who do carry out ‘women’s work’
in terms of their experiences of the workplace. Her research was undertaken in four
settings: an elementary (primary) school, secretarial work, unpaid care work and a
strip club. She found that men in women’s work tend to either withdraw (by empha-
sising their masculinity and disassociating from the predominantly feminine culture)
or emphasise and parody prejudices (about their sexuality, for instance) and become
‘hyper-feminine’. She argues that when women carry out ‘men’s work’ they can either
emphasise their femininity (and become devalued) or adopt masculine values (when
they are more likely to do well at work, and be seen as promotable for instance). Both
men and women, she concludes, tend to be rewarded for emphasising distance from
femininity. Most women, therefore, are typically penalised. She argues that the culture
of work and the devaluation of femininity explains, in part, the persistence of the gender
pay gap, and also why men are able to sustain their advantage over women in the
labour market, even when they ‘cross over’ into women’s work.
In the same collection, Harriet Bradley (1993) argues that most men (even
unemployed ones) are unwilling to enter women’s work because of the low pay and
low status attached to it. Her work examines patterns of men’s entry into women’s work
and the factors which influence their exit. She identifies three strategies of men’s entry
into women’s occupations: takeover (through which female work becomes male work
– baking and brewing, dairy work and spinning are examples); invasion (through which
men take over the more technical, high status aspects of the work – obstetrics,
personnel and social work, for instance); and infiltration (‘the hardest to trace, to quantify
and analyse’ (p. 21), this involves male employees having no particular interest in
driving women out or in changing the nature of the occupation, but at the same time
appearing to reject hegemonic masculinity). She concludes that three factors influence
men’s ‘cross over’ into women’s work: economic issues (high levels of unemployment,
for instance), changes in masculinity and technological change.

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Similar findings emerged from Simon Cross and Barbara Bagilhole’s (2002) ethno-
graphic study of ten men working in a range of women’s jobs, which emphasised the
challenges to their masculinity experienced by men from various sources and in various
ways. They found that men attempted either to maintain a traditional masculinity
by distancing themselves from female colleagues, and/or partially reconstructed an
alternative masculine identity by aligning themselves closely with their non-traditional
occupation. They conclude that these responses maintain masculinity as the dominant
gender, even amongst men working in traditionally female jobs.
Other research has emphasised that when men enter women’s work they often do
so on a relatively temporary or transitional basis. England and Herbert (1993) for
instance have argued that men enter women’s work through a ‘revolving door’, and that
the culture of masculinity ensures that they rarely stay long because ‘men employed in
female dominated occupations suffer a prestige penalty’ (p. 50). Williams and Villemel
(1993) have argued similarly that some men enter through a ‘trap door’, meaning that
they intend to pursue more traditional male occupations, but end up (temporarily) in
women’s work. The metaphor of the trap door is intended to convey that men work
in women’s jobs ‘only briefly and are likely to move upwards as they exit’ (p. 72). Allan’s
(1993) study of male primary schoolteachers emphasises that men in women’s work
often have to renegotiate their masculinity and consciously perform their gender
identity in order to overcome apparent contradictions. This gender performance, Allan
argues, is ‘a kind of unacknowledged work in itself’ (p. 115). Developing this approach
further, Rosemary Pringle (1993), in her study of male secretaries, adopts a Foucaldian
approach that focuses on the gendered nature of occupational discourse (the language
used to define the ‘reality’ of a particular occupation, and that shapes how that occu-
pation is perceived and experienced). She argues that ‘neither occupational titles nor
gender labels merely describe a pre-given reality, but exist in discourses that actively
constitute that reality’ (p. 130). Hence, she concludes that men perceive and experience
women’s work differently to women. As we noted above, this is not only because of
structural patterns of (horizontal and vertical) occupational segmentation, but also
because of cultural segmentation, according to which men and women experience
(and are perceived in) the same occupation differently, so that the culture of the job
changes, depending on whether it is performed by a man or a woman. Therefore, men
who do secretarial work are not perceived as secretaries, because of their gender, but
often as ‘personal assistants’. The significance of occupational discourse means that
our perception of secretarial work is shaped not by what a secretary does but by what
or rather who a secretary is, and how this relates to and is embedded within gendered
perceptions of the difference between men and women.
A similar point is made by Applegate and Kaye (1993) in their study of male care
workers, which found that in unpaid caring work men become ‘feminised’ and begin
to adopt skills and personality traits traditionally associated with women. However,
patriarchal ideology and discourses of masculinity and femininity meant that, for
the men in their study, caring work continued to be perceived as women’s work. Their
research, they conclude, indicates the resilience of gender ideology and discourses to
the work that men and women actually perform.

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Gender and the professions

Women tend to be concentrated in the ‘female’ semi-professional occupations rather

than in the male-dominated professions. Semi-professional occupations have less
autonomy than professional ones, as well as lower status and less pay. Women are
often seen as ‘naturally’ suited to the caring work involved, for example, in primary
schoolteaching, nursing and social work. However, even within these occupations,
women tend to be concentrated in lower grades and are often supervised by men.
Although there have been improvements in recent years, there is still considerable
evidence that sex stereotyping and discrimination occurs in many professional occu-
pations (EOC, 2004). By the end of the twentieth century, younger women’s professional
qualifications had increased to a similar level to men’s, whereas older generations of
women were generally less qualified than men. As a result, there have been substantial
changes in the proportion of women entering certain professions, such as higher
education and the law. However, women’s share of senior jobs even within those
occupations in which they are generally as well qualified as men remains relatively low
(a pattern that is explained in part by age difference) (EOC, 2004).
Certain professional or associated professional occupations remain heavily gender
segmented (Table 9.6). For example, men still hold over 90 per cent of engineering jobs,
even in the field of software engineering. Women, however, constitute over 80 per cent
of primary school and nursery teachers, but only 38 per cent of university lecturers,
and just over half of college lecturers. Women are over-represented in the ‘caring’
professions such as nursing and social welfare, as well as personnel and industrial
relations, whereas men dominate professions such as the law and finance. Men are also
the majority of surveyors and architects. Amongst the associated professions, the two
female-dominated occupations (health professionals and social welfare) also have the
highest proportion of part-time employees (EOC, 2004).
As we noted above, in the established professions, there has been an increase in
recent years in the number of women entering the professions, but not necessarily
in their representation at the higher levels. Medicine is the profession that has the
highest proportion of women in most societies. In the UK, for instance, in 1976 23
per cent of all doctors on the General Medical Council Register were women, and the
proportion of women entering medical school had increased from between 22 and
25 per cent in the years between the Second World War to 1968, to 37.8 per cent in
1978 (Elston, 1980), to 46 per cent in 1985 (Allen, 1988), and over to 50 per cent by
the 1990s (Hockey, 1993). However, despite being 25 per cent of medical graduates
in the 1960s and almost half by the 1980s, women are still under-represented in the
higher levels of the medical profession (in 2000, only 21 per cent of hospital consultants
were women, and only 5 per cent of consultant surgeons). Women are also concen-
trated in certain areas of medicine – in general practice, in the school health service,
in mental health and particularly in paediatrics (in which they made up the largest
group of female consultants in 2000 – nearly 40 per cent). These tend to be specialisms
that are socially constructed as ‘feminine’ areas of medicine, or in which women’s real
or potential conflict between home and work can be reduced. They are also the areas
of medicine that are less popular amongst men (women also tend to be concentrated
in the same areas of medicine as immigrant male doctors). Some 34 per cent of GPs

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Table 9.6 Employment in selected professional and associated professional occupations,

UK, 2000 (%)

Women Men All

All professional occupations 40 60 100

Natural scientists 35 65 100
Engineers and technologists 6 94 100
software engineers 8 92 100
Health professionals 40 60 100
medical practitioners 38 62 100
pharmacists/pharmacologists 61 39 100
Teaching professionals 64 36 100
universities 38 62 100
HE and FE colleges 54 46 100
secondary schools 53 47 100
primary/nursery schools 86 14 100
Legal professionals 32 68 100
solicitors 33 67 100
Business and financial professionals 30 70 100
chartered and certified accountants 26 74 100
management consultants and business analysts 34 66 100
Architects, town planners and surveyors 13 87 100

All associated professional occupations 51 49 100

Scientific technicians 24 76 100
Draughtspersons, quantity and other surveyors 9 81 100
Computer analysts and programmers 21 79 100
Health associate professions 87 13 100
nurses 90 10 100
Business and financial associate professionals 37 63 100
underwriters, claim assessors, brokers, analysts 30 70 100
personnel and industrial relations officers 79 21 100
Social welfare associate professionals 76 24 100
welfare, community and youth workers 73 27 100
Literary, artistic and sports professionals 38 62 100

Source: Labour Force Survey, Spring 2000, cited in EOC, 2004.

in England in 2000 were women, compared with only 25 per cent in 1990. One reason
for this increase is that part-time work and job sharing have become better established
in general practice than in other areas of the medical profession; by 1999, 41 per cent
of female GPs worked half-time or three-quarter time contracts or were job-sharing.
In contrast, 93.5 per cent of male GPs were employed on full-time contracts (EOC,
2004). Interestingly, only a small percentage of women become obstetricians or
gynaecologists (the figure of roughly 12–15 per cent has remained stable since the
1970s).
It is often argued that the reason for women’s lack of career prospects is their
domestic commitments, because they take time out of their professional careers to
have children, seek part-time work when they return and are not ‘really’ committed to
their work in the same way as men. It could be argued, however, that women are

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disadvantaged in the professions because the training and promotion opportunities

offered to them are based on assumptions about continuous, full-time work, that few
professional occupations could realistically be carried out on a part-time basis and
that candidates for promotion are expected to have had certain experiences and
achieved certain ‘benchmarks’ by a certain age. All of these criteria are of course
difficult for a woman who has had a career-break or who needs to work part-time for
a particular period.
Isobel Allen (1988) found that from the point of entry to medical school through
to hospital consultant posts, women doctors face sexist attitudes, have to compete with
an ‘old boys’ network’ of patronage, are often asked discriminatory questions at
interviews (for example, questions about childcare arrangements were asked of most
women in her study, some of whom did not even have children). Barbara Lawrence
(1987), in a study of female general practitioners, found similarly that many women
had decided to set up their own practice to avoid being dominated by male partners.
They had found that in mixed group practices they were paid less than their male
colleagues, and were expected to see all of the women and children on the patient list.
A similar pattern can be identified in the law. Women currently make up some 35
per cent of solicitors holding practising certificates (PCs) in England and Wales. This
compares with only 21 per cent in 1989. Each year women have formed the majority
of those admitted to the solicitors’ roll, and in 2000 they comprised 53 per cent of new
entrants to the profession. However, women remain concentrated in the lowest levels
of the profession. In 2000, 82 per cent of partners with a PC in private practice were
male, while women formed the majority of assistant solicitors. Overall, over half of all
male solicitors, but less than a quarter of female solicitors, were partners. One factor
contributing to this is age – the average age of a female solicitor with a PC in 2000 was
36 (compared with a male average of 43), and women also comprised the majority
of PC holders aged 30 and under. Of barristers practising in England and Wales
in 2000, 26 per cent were women, compared with only 18 per cent in 1990. Women
also comprised 46 per cent of those called to the Bar in 2000. However, they accounted
for only 8 per cent of practising QCs (Queen’s Counsels), the recognised leaders of the
profession in England and Wales (EOC, 2004).
In contrast to the male-dominated professions, women occupy the majority in
the more feminised, semi-professions. Jobs such as nursing and teaching are seen as
suitable jobs for women because of the hours worked, the demands on interpersonal
skills and the relatively steady employment prospects. However, these occupations
lack the autonomy enjoyed by the established professions and women who work in
them are often dominated by men: nurses by male hospital doctors and consultants,
female teachers by male headmasters, for instance. In 2000, 70 per cent of secondary
school heads in England and Wales were men (EOC, 2004). While the pay is relatively
high in these occupations, compared with the pay of women in general, it is poor in
comparison with the salaries enjoyed by those in the ‘male’ professions. In both nursing
and teaching, women are under-represented in the top grades when account is taken
of the ratio of men to women in the occupation as a whole (EOC, 2004).
Women are marginalised then in professional and semi-professional work in a
range of ways. They occupy the lower-status, less well-remunerated levels within most
professional and semi-professional occupations, and gendered assumptions about

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appropriate work for men and women, as well as the impact of women’s domestic
responsibilities, continue to shape the gendered division of professional work.
In her neo-Weberian analysis of gender and professional work, Davies (1996)
emphasised two ways in which the professions engage in exclusionary ‘closure’:
organisational cultures and informal networks that exclude women or make women
‘uncomfortable’, and the social construction of skill. In her discussion of professional
work in medicine and in professions allied to medicine, she develops this latter theme
in particular, emphasising that the social construction of ‘professionalism’ is itself
gendered in so far as it relies on values, such as impartiality, objectivity, that are
traditionally associated with men rather than women, as well as on the unacknow-
ledged emotional and support work of women (through which men are able to maintain
the ‘illusion’ of detachment). Male doctors, for instance, are seen as professional
(detached, scientific, and so on) in part because of the emotional support work of
nurses that women are thought to be more suited to. From this, Davies concludes that
a key sociological problem is not simply women’s exclusion from professional work,
but rather the nature of their inclusion in it. A similar point has been made about
women’s role in managerial work (Gherardi, 1995).

Managerial work

Since the mid-1990s women’s representation amongst executives has doubled and
amongst company directors it has tripled (Table 9.7). At the same time, there has been
an overall increase in the number of women working in management jobs (although
the overall number of managers increased considerably during the 1990s; and manage-
ment still accounts for only 9 per cent of female employment, but 14 per cent of men’s).
The patterns of occupational segmentation that exist in other areas of work can also
be identified in management, however. Women still comprise less than a quarter of
executives, and only one in ten company directors; men outnumber women in most
sectors of management, the exceptions being office managers (66 per cent), and health
and social services (73 per cent). Men, in contrast, account for 79 per cent of corporate
managers and 94 per cent of production managers (EOC, 2004). Women also account
for a higher proportion of managers in the public than the private sector; their share
of managerial employment also varies between industries. For example, women
comprise two-thirds of managers in health and social work, but only one in ten of those

Table 9.7 Female share of managers, UK, 1990–2001 (%)

1974 1990 1995 2000 2001

Director 0.6 1.6 3.0 9.6 9.9

Function head 0.4 4.2 5.8 15.0 15.8
Department head 2.1 7.2 9.7 19.0 25.5
Section leader 2.4 11.8 14.2 26.5 28.9

All managers 1.8 7.9 10.7 22.1 24.1

Source: National Management Salary Survey, cited in EOC, 2004.

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in construction. Although, as we noted above, women are over-represented in personnel

and industrial relations, they comprise only 57 per cent of personnel and HR managers
(the majority being employed at ‘officer’ level).
What some management writers refer to as the ‘glass ceiling’ (Davidson and
Cooper, 1992) – the situation where women can see but not reach or break through
seemingly invisible barriers to high-level jobs and so are prevented from progressing
their careers – appears still to exist in many organisations. Several explanations for
women’s continuing low representation in management have been put forward. First,
like most occupations, there is a tendency for some types of management jobs to be
associated with either men or women; in other words, to be constructed in gendered
terms. For example, while women are comparatively well represented in personnel
management and the public sector, men still dominate in production management
and in information and communication technology management. Second, oppor-
tunities to work part-time are relatively limited in management jobs, in which a ‘long
hours’ culture prevails – in the UK, only 6 per cent of managers and senior officials
(three-quarters of whom are female) work part-time (EOC, 2004). Similarly, there are
few (formal) opportunities for flexible working at senior levels in organisations. The
EOC (2004) reports that no other occupational group has a lower proportion of part-
time workers. A higher proportion of managers (22 per cent in 2001) than employees
in any other occupational group usually work more than 50 hours per week. Male
managers (27 per cent) are twice as likely as females (10 per cent) to do so (EOC,
2004). Also, a higher proportion of female managers than male managers are single
or divorced. Women managers are also much less likely than male managers to have
dependent children, particularly very young children.
A study of 220 managers in a banking organisation found, for instance, that women
managers are significantly less likely to be married or to have children, concluding
that ‘women still have to make choices that men do not in order to further their careers’.
The same study found that men reported higher levels of pressure stemming from the
work environment and managerial relationships with subordinates and superiors than
women, whereas women reported considerably higher pressures stemming from
perceived gender inequalities at work, and concerns about balancing their work and
domestic commitments (Granleese, 2004, p. 219).
The long hours culture, which pervades many organisations and management
occupations, means that those women with family responsibilities are at a particular
disadvantage. This is compounded by their exclusion also from the (largely male-
dominated) informal networks within organisations and within which power relations
(and promotion opportunities, for instance) are often negotiated. Even where women
have broken through the ‘glass ceiling’ into management positions, their pay is often
lower than that of men.
Much of the academic literature on managerial work has focused on the barriers
women face in organisations, particularly with regard to the effects of the ‘glass ceiling’.
While early (mainly liberal) feminist texts such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s (1977) Men
and Women of the Corporation provided a comprehensive review of these barriers,
advocating solutions (such as equal opportunities policies and legislation), more recent
managerially oriented texts have tended to focus on the benefits to an organisation of
employing women in management positions. Reflecting the gendered assumptions

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underpinning women’s concentration in caring and service work, what has come to
be known as the ‘women in management’ literature focuses on gender differences
in management styles, arguing that women’s ways of managing are particularly appro-
priate to contemporary work organisations, and that women’s skills in multitasking
and in interpersonal communication are ideally suited to management. A key man-
agement writer in this area is Judy Rosener whose (1990) article in the Harvard Business
Review focused on the differences between male and female management styles,
arguing that the latter is increasingly suited to the turbulence and uncertainty of the
contemporary workplace. Women she argued, adopt a ‘transformational’ style of
management based on nurturing, enabling and empowering, whereas men prefer
a ‘transactional’ approach which associates leadership with direction and control. A
similar article by Nanette Fondas (1997) advocated a feminisation of management,
making the point that ‘qualities that are culturally associated with females are appearing
in descriptions of managerial work in the texts of contemporary writers, and these texts
function as carriers of a feminine ethos to practicing managers’ (p. 257). She associates
the feminisation of managerial work with three developing themes that, she argues,
are espoused by contemporary management writers and which are associated with
feminine qualities. These are: surrendering control in favour of shared responsibility,
helping and developing others through a nurturing rather than a controlling approach
to management, and building a connected network of relationships.
Emphasising themes such as these, the ‘women in management’ literature has
placed women at the centre of analyses of managerial work, and has attempted to high-
light the value to organisations of the skills associated with women’s role in the
domestic sphere. Various studies have examined the difficulties women face in organi-
sations from work/family conflicts and caring responsibilities (Davidson and Cooper,
1992), from the ‘old boys’ network’ (Coe, 1992; Ibarra, 1993) and from patriarchal
assumptions about gender differences in work orientations and commitment (Sturges,
1999). Many such analyses, however, are dependent upon universal and essentialist
assumptions about men’s and women’s ‘natures’ or roles. They are also managerial
in so far as they are concerned largely with the organisational benefits of women’s
attributed natures or skills, rather than with advancing women’s rights. Hence, they are
primarily concerned with the commodification and management of sexual difference,
rather than advancing a feminist agenda concerned with alleviating inequalities
experienced by women as a group.
Less managerial approaches have argued that many work organisations support
a competitive, hegemonic masculinity that sustains and reproduces a variety of
controlling, instrumental and goal-oriented behaviours that serve to exclude women
and femininity (Calas and Smircich, 1991), or to undermine women managers (Kerfoot
and Knights, 1998). Silvia Gherardi (1995) has drawn attention to the exclusion
of women through organisational symbolism and cultures. Gender difference, she
argues, is both an organising principle, and an outcome of the organisation of work.
As she puts it, ‘gender is an organising principle and an organisational outcome. Gender
characteristics are presupposed, imposed on people and exploited for productive ends,
and there are organisational dynamics which create them’ (p. 185).
In her study of women managers in five multinational companies, Judy Wajcman
(2002) focused on the ways in which gender relations in the private sphere are adapted

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to accommodate a managerial career. Her analysis reveals that ‘the domestic arrange-
ments necessary to sustain the life of a senior manager are very different for men and
women’ (p. 609). Her conclusion is that for all the organisational initiatives designed
to promote equal opportunities, the managerial career is still ‘largely dependent upon
the services of a wife at home, or a housewife substitute in the form of paid domestic
services’ (p. 609).
Other studies, such as Fiona Wilson’s (1995) have drawn attention to the ways
in which women managers are controlled and marginalised, in part through their
experiences of sexual harassment and sexual power relations in the workplace.

Sexuality and work

As well as sexualised labour (see above), feminist studies of the workplace have
highlighted that masculine power and sexuality are evident in work organisations in
a number of ways. Sexual harassment, for instance, is one of the ways in which men
subordinate and control women at work (Collinson and Collinson, 1996; MacKinnon,
1987; Stanko, 1988; Ramazanoglu, 1987) and sexual power relations permeate organ-
isational cultures in a range of ways (Brewis and Linstead, 2000). Indeed, feminists
such as Cockburn (1990) have argued that men actively employ a number of tactics,
including sexual harassment, to offer active resistance to moves towards sexual
equality in work organisations. Sexuality, and particularly an ideology of ‘compulsory
heterosexuality’ (see Chapter 8) is also deeply embedded within the culture of many
work organisations (Hall, 1989). This affects women’s position in the labour market and
their experiences of the workplace in a number of ways that cross-cut other aspects
of identity, such as age. Women are frequently judged on the basis of their looks, and
often have to dress and behave in ways different from men in the same occupation.
Research by Tyler and Abbott (1998) found that female flight attendants were sub-
ject to a more stringent regime of appearance norms than their male colleagues, for
instance. Women’s sexuality is often commodified in order to make their employing
organisation, or its products or services, more marketable. Clara Greed (1994) points
to a comment frequently made by the male surveyors she interviewed: ‘attractive
women make unattractive property more attractive.’ Gherardi (1995) has similarly
highlighted how the sexualisation of the employment relationship is particularly evident
in ‘boundary roles’ where workers interact with environments external to the organ-
isation. She emphasises how women are often used to control these relationships, to
inhibit hostility and ensure social control.
While socialist and liberal feminists have argued that sexual relations are deter-
mined by the unequal power between men and women, radical and poststructuralist
feminists argue that they do not reflect but also determine unequal power relations.
Boys and young men are socialised to see heterosexuality as an integral aspect of
being masculine, of being a ‘real man’ with all its associated privileges, status and
rewards. They are often socialised to believe that men have sexual access to women
as of right, and to see women’s bodies primarily in sexual terms. Thus women’s bodies
in a whole range of occupational settings are objectified (in advertising and in pornog-
raphy, for instance, as well as in prostitution). Conversely, girls and young women are

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often socialised to see women as providing service and pleasure for men in the private
and public spheres; they are socialised into service roles and largely into servicing
men. However, gender relations in the labour market – in patterns of participation and
segmentation, for instance, as well as in men’s and women’s experiences of work –
have been explained largely with reference to a combination of supply and demand
factors, as well as in terms of gendered and sexual ideologies. Both the search for
profit in the capitalist mode of production, and the power of men and masculinity have
been seen as central.

Explaining the gendered labour market

Like many other areas of sociology, feminists have developed a critique of malestream
theories of work and its organisation. As Peta Tancred (1995) notes, feminist research
on domestic labour, homeworking, the link between production and reproduction,
sexuality in organisations, the gendered nature of skill, and gendered service work has
problematised malestream definitions of work and skill, as well as theories about the
organisation of work. As she puts it, ‘in subjecting the sociology of work . . . to feminist
binoculars, the essential point is that the basic categories of analysis were not thought
through in gendered terms’ (p. 12). What this means is that the ability of sociology to
deal ‘not only with women’s work, but also with the changing contours of men’s work’
remains problematic (p. 11).
Most malestream theories of work and organisation derive from Marxist or
Weberian ideas and focus either on the nature of capitalism and the labour process,
or on bureaucratic modes of organisation, power relations and the labour market.
More recently, postmodern and poststructuralist ideas, particularly associated with
the influence of Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida (see Hancock and Tyler, 2001), as well
as post-colonial theories, have begun to shape organisation theory. It is only relatively
recently, as we noted in Chapter 1, that feminist writing has begun to have a significant
impact on sociological theories of work and organisation.
However, within organisation studies the focus on work tends to be limited to
waged work, and mainly to the realm of formal organisations, thereby neglecting much
of the work that women do, both in the ‘informal’ economy and in the performance of
domestic labour and caring work. Similarly, the assumed separation of the productive
and reproductive spheres has been accorded limited critical attention. As Tancred
puts it, ‘an investigation of the changing relations between the two spheres would be
far more illuminating’ (p. 13). Yet, the sociology of work and organisation continues
to focus its critical attention largely on waged labour and the formal realm of the work
organisation. Equally, and despite giving critical attention to the deskilling debate,
triggered largely by Braverman’s (1974) highly influential consideration of what he
called the ‘degradation of work’ in Labour and Monopoly Capital, the sociology of work
has tended to neglect the ways in which the definition of skill is gendered. Feminist and
pro-feminist contributions have emphasised the socially constructed nature of skill
and argued that whether or not work is defined as skilled depends more on the gender
of the worker than on the nature of the work itself (Phillips and Taylor, 1980). Feminist
research, particularly on women’s caring and service work, has highlighted the ‘tacit’

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or ‘invisible’ skills involved in occupations in which women are over-represented, and

has also argued that the attribution of these skills to gender or to women’s ‘nature’ has
provided ideological justification for the persistence of patterns of occupational
segmentation, for women’s concentration in part-time, low-status work, and for the
gender pay gap.
In order to explain men’s and women’s position in the labour market and many
of the issues neglected by malestream theories of work, many feminists have argued
that we need to understand the ways in which patriarchy and capitalism articulate
together to subordinate and exploit women. Put simply, feminists such as Sylvia Walby
(1990) in her book Theorizing Patriarchy have argued that patriarchy is concerned with
the subordination of women to serve the needs of men, including their sexual needs,
and capitalism with securing a flexible, cheap labour force in which women’s sup-
posedly ‘innate’ skills can be commodified and exploited in the pursuit of profit. While
it may be in the interests of patriarchy for women to stay at home, it is in the interests
of capitalism for women to engage in (low) paid work. One of the ways in which these
interests reach a mutual accommodation is in the concentration of women in part-time
work, for instance.
According to Walby (1990), there has been a move in many Western societies
away from the ‘private patriarchy’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(involving the non-admission of women to the public sphere), to a system of ‘public
patriarchy’ whereby women are not excluded from the public sphere but are dis-
advantaged, marginalised and exploited within it. In terms of employment, this has
meant a move away from strategies designed to exclude women from paid work
(through ‘protective’ legislation, for example) to segregationist and subordinating
strategies (manifest in occupational segmentation and in women’s under-representation
in trade unions and professional bodies, for instance). This means that many women
are exploited and dominated by men in the private sphere (as wives, mothers and
daughters), and in the public sphere, as well as meeting the needs of capitalism for
a cheap, flexible labour force. The relationship between capitalism and patriarchy is
thought to be dynamic so that changes in one aspect of it will cause changes elsewhere,
and it is thought to vary in its impact on different groups and in different societies.
Feminists have argued then, that patriarchy and capitalism have competing
interests but reach mutual accommodations; thus men (as fathers, partners and
husbands) benefit from the additional income generated by women who work – espe-
cially as research suggests that many women continue to retain the major responsibility
for childcare and domestic labour (especially given their relatively lower wages than
men). Employers are able to sell goods and services by exploiting the caring ‘nature’
attributed to women, their ascribed interpersonal skills, and their sexuality.
Other explanations for the gendered nature of work and its organisation have
drawn on poststructuralism, and have emphasised particularly the role of power
relations and discourse. A notable example of this approach is Silvia Gherardi’s (1996)
account of women in organisations as ‘travellers in a male world’. This ‘travel’
discourse, she argues, presumes the existence of a territory marked out as male which
is trespassed upon by women who are formally members of the same organisation
or occupation, but who must ‘stake out’ their positions in the field. This process – that
she terms gender positioning – involves transitional work. Gender relations in work

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organisations and in the labour market, she argues, can therefore be viewed as ‘cultural
performances learned and enacted on appropriate occasions both by men and women’
(p. 187).

The changing nature of work

In their account of key transformations in the nature of work and its organisation,
Macionis and Plummer (2002) describe five notable changes to the economies of
Western societies brought about by the industrial revolution beginning in the mid-
eighteenth century. These are: new forms of energy, the centralisation of work in
factories, the expansion of manufacturing and mass production, the establishment
of a division of labour and of specialisation, and the establishment of wage labour. By
the mid-twentieth century, the nature of production had changed considerably, how-
ever, and many Western societies were being transformed once again by what
many writers have described as an ‘information revolution’ and the development of
‘post-industrial society’. As Macionis and Plummer (2002, p. 349) note, ‘automated
machinery reduced the role of human labour in production, while bureaucracy
simultaneously expanded the ranks of clerical workers and managers’. Service
industries such as public relations, health care, travel and tourism, education, the mass
media, advertising, banking and sales, began to dominate the economies both
in financial and in employment terms. Commentators such as Daniel Bell (see Bell,
1999) began to argue in the 1970s that a post-industrial era could be distinguished by
a shift from industrial labour to service jobs. Alongside this process of structural
reconfiguration has been the expansion of media and communications technologies
– most obviously, the computer – and the emergence of what sociologist Manuel
Castells (1989, 1996) has termed ‘the network society’. Much of this has changed the
nature and experience of work just as the emergence of factory-based production did
over two centuries ago. Macionis and Plummer (2002) outline three key changes
unleashed by the information revolution and the alleged shift towards a post-industrial
society. These are:

1 A shift from tangible products to ideas – whereas the industrial era was defined by
the production of goods, in post-industrial society economies are shaped by the
exchange of ideas and services, so that work increasingly revolves around
the creation and manipulation of symbols or experiences (advertising executives,
architects, design consultants, and so on).
2 A shift from mechanical skills to literacy skills – whereas the industrial revolution
required mechanical and technical skill of its workforce, the post-industrial labour
market demands that workers have the ability to speak, write and communicate
effectively, and increasingly to be computer literate also.
3 Decentralisation of work – just as industrial technology resulted in a process of
urbanisation that drew workers and their families into towns and cities, computer
and mobile telecommunications technology now means that this trend is in many
ways reversing. It is also (as we noted above with reference to managerial work)
perpetuating a long hours culture in which there is little ‘escape’ from work.

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Capitalism is clearly a dynamic system, and keeps changing its form. One of the
major changes that has come about in recent years has been characterised as a shift
in the flexibility of production from Fordism to post-Fordism. Fordism is associated
with the car manufacturer Henry Ford who, at the beginning of the twentieth century,
developed assembly line production techniques to manufacture cheap cars that could
be purchased by the masses. This system of production, and its link to mass
consumption of standard products, has come to be described as Fordism. It depends
on dedicated machinery and tools; centralised unskilled or semi-skilled labour
organised according to highly specialised task divisions, and low-cost production of
vast quantities of uniform goods. As Huw Beynon’s (1973) study of a Ford factory in
Liverpool in the late 1960s documented, the work is tedious yet the conveyor-belt
production line creates relentless pressure, and the mode of organisation is particularly
inflexible.
Whilst Fordist production techniques continued throughout most of the twentieth
century, other modes of organisation began to develop (especially in Japan and
Southeast Asia), involving more flexible systems of production; more flexible use of
time (use of temporary and self-employed workers, for instance); decentralisation
of labour into small units; the ‘casualisation of labour’ with less stability and job security;
‘just-in-time’ rapid production and distribution; movement from production to market-
led production (and proliferation of consumer choice); a gradual replacement of
mass marketing and advertising with ‘niche marketing’; and globalisation, with a new
international division of labour. This global division of labour means that each region
of the world specialises in particular kinds of economic activity. Agriculture occupies
more than 70 per cent of the workforce in low-income countries. Industrial production
is concentrated in the middle- to high-income nations, and the richest economies,
including those in Europe, now largely specialise in service provision, many having
‘outsourced’ their more polluting, industrial production and manufacturing to poorer
countries, at a lower cost. This latter trend had led many writers to argue that the
global division of labour signals a form of neo-colonialism.
Contemporary trends in the organisation of work are likely to impact on women
in a number of ways, particularly in relation to the gender pay gap (EOC, 2001). First,
the trend towards more fragmented organisations may continue to undermine legis-
lation on equal pay, which in most countries is based on comparable work for the
same employer. There are an increasing number of situations in which there is no
single employer and in these cases (when work is subcontracted, franchises are
operated, in joint ventures or partnerships, or when employment agency staff are used),
the scope for direct comparison in pay and working conditions is restricted. The further
fragmentation of the public sector in the UK and elsewhere, through the contracting
out of services, may widen the pay gap further and exacerbate women’s already
disadvantaged working conditions. Second, the dismantling of traditional career
paths within organisations may widen the gap between the lifetime earnings of men
and women. It may also mean that the ability and willingness of employees to fund
skills and training development for lower level employees is further restricted. A greater
emphasis on career mobility across organisations may also penalise women, particu-
larly those with children or other caring responsibilities. Third, as payment systems in
many work organisations shift away from collective bargaining coverage towards

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greater use of individualised performance awards and personal contracts, women may
become further disadvantaged. The increased emphasis on individual competencies
may lead to greater attention being paid to leadership skills, which (as we noted above)
are often culturally associated with masculinity, and may also result in increased
pressure to work longer hours (EOC, 2004).

The global division of labour

Such significant changes in the world economy, such as rapid globalisation and tech-
nological developments, have shaped the economic realities experienced by men and
women in various ways. Many global organisations or TNEs (transnational enterprises)
operate according to a global division of labour that involves ‘outsourcing’ some
of their functions (such as garment manufacturing, or more recently call-centre
operations) to relatively poor regions of the world in which wages are low and working
conditions are relatively unregulated.
Women comprise an increasing share of the labour force in almost all regions of
the world, and in many countries this has translated, as many early feminists
anticipated, into a more equitable relationship between men and women in terms of
the distribution of social, political and economic resources. However, even in these
societies (as elsewhere) women generally still suffer worse economic conditions than
men, although this is to a varying degree within and between different countries and
regions. In most countries, men and women are concentrated in different sectors of
the labour market, often due to the impact of their (actual or assumed) domestic
responsibilities, and as a result of gender ideologies about what work is most appro-
priate for women – usually in the lowest status, lowest paid sectors of the labour market.
In most countries of the world, men are more likely to be employers or self-employed
than women; men dominate in crafts and trade, whereas women are concentrated in
service and caring occupations (www.unece.org). Women are more often unpaid
family workers, in temporary or part-time jobs, or in the informal sector without job
security. Men generally have more status and are more often employed at senior,
managerial or professional levels than women. This impacts on the economic and
social security of individual women and their families, usually to the detriment of
women. Women are often the first to be affected when job opportunities are lacking,
and often find it more difficult to find work than men do when they are unemployed.
As we noted in Chapter 3, economic development in some of the poorest regions
of the world can both alleviate and exacerbate women’s disadvantage relative
to men and in some areas, such as sub-Saharan and West Africa, in which there has
been considerable internal migration in recent decades, many women and their
children have been left without any means of sustaining a living and hence their
vulnerability to poverty has increased considerably. In other parts of the world,
in Southeast Asia for example, economic development has occurred alongside the
expansion of the sex industry, in which large numbers of women (and children)
are exploited (see Chapter 8).

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Conclusions

With the process of industrialisation, clear boundaries between work and home
were established and women became concentrated largely in the latter on the assump-
tion that caring for the domestic sphere was women’s ‘natural’ role. As well as the
bifurcation of spheres, industrialisation also resulted in the establishment of patterns
of labour market segmentation. Although many of the early liberal and socialist
feminists fought for the right for women to engage in paid work, on the assumption
that it would lead to liberation, and many latter-day Marxists – including those in the
former Soviet Union – have done the same, we can see that work is not necessarily
a source of liberation for women. The work that women do in the labour market often
reinforces their traditional roles within the family and, many feminists have argued, is
often determined by those roles. Hence, women tend to be over-represented in a
narrow range of occupations, and within those in the lowest levels of the occupational
hierarchies; women are also over-represented in part-time work and in service sector
work. These patterns are reflected in the gendering of professional and managerial
work, and in the control and commodification of women’s sexuality in the workplace.
Indeed, many of the recent changes that have taken place in the labour markets
of Western societies have served to compound women’s relatively disadvantaged
position in paid work, by further commodifying the skills attributed to women.
Feminists have explained women’s marginalisation and exploitation in paid work
largely with reference to the dynamic relationship between patriarchy and capitalism,
and some feminists such as Walby (1990) have argued that a move from ‘private’ to
‘public patriarchy’ has taken place during the last century or so, so that rather than being
excluded from paid work, many women are exploited within it.

SUMMARY

1 Feminists have developed a critique of malestream sociological

definitions of ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ arguing that this distinction does not
reflect many women’s experiences of work, primarily because it
ignores the role of domestic labour.
2 Whereas before the industrial revolution there was no clear separation
of work and home, industrialisation bifurcated these spheres and
established patterns of labour market segmentation. Domestic
ideology and protective legislation, as well as the idea of the ‘family
wage’, gradually excluded most women from paid work.
3 Even though women are increasingly engaging in paid work, they tend
to remain responsible for domestic labour (including childcare) and are
concentrated in a narrow range of relatively low-paid, low-status jobs
and in part-time work.
4 Feminists have undertaken a range of workplace studies, involving
research on factory work, care work, clerical work, work in the service

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sector, professional and managerial work, and have argued that

occupations in each of these sectors are gendered in a range of ways.
Feminists have also emphasised that women’s sexuality is controlled
and commodified in paid work.
5 Feminists have argued that ‘skill’ is used to justify women’s relatively
low pay and that certain occupations are essentialised, some are
feminised and others are sexualised.
6 Recent changes in the labour markets of Western societies, such as
the expansion of the service sector, have reinforced women’s roles.

FURTHER READING

Alvesson, M. and Due Billing, Y. (1997) Understanding Gender and Organizations. London: Sage.
This pro-feminist text explores a range of theoretical and empirical themes relating to gender
and work and avoids equating gender solely with women. It focuses on gendered processes
in work organisations, and also warns against the dangers of gender ‘over-sensitivity’ (i.e.
privileging gender as an analytical category over all issues within work and organisations). The
writing style is quite ‘dense’ however, and it would perhaps be useful to start with a more
introductory overview.
Blackwell (2003) The Blackwell Reader in Gender, Work and Organization. Oxford: Blackwell.
As the title suggests, this is a collection of articles which explore some of the central themes
which have emerged from the sociological analysis of gender and work in recent years. It is
thematically comprehensive, and incorporates papers from a range of feminist (and pro-feminist)
perspectives.

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 CHAPTER TEN

Crime, violence and criminal justice

We are all concerned to explain or make sense of criminal behaviour – to make sense
of actions that appear to us as unnatural or strange. Of course, some behaviours
may seem more problematic than others: for example, we may find it relatively easy
to understand why a lone-parent mother on supplementary benefit stole food from
the local supermarket, but much more difficult to understand why our next-door neigh-
bour beat his wife. When we try to explain criminal behaviour, we tend nonetheless to
use a few single-factor motivational or trait categories – sickness, jealousy, hate, greed,
over-permissiveness and lack of social (especially parental) control. We tend to assume
that the behaviour can be explained by characteristics of the individual or her life
experiences. Sociologists and other criminologists tend to argue that lay explanations
or common-sense theories are simplistic and inadequate. Despite this, there are close
parallels between common-sense and social science explanations.

Explaining crime – women as criminals

Much crime seems to us inexplicable; we cannot understand how any human being
could have committed it. We hear the details of the behaviour with incredulity and see
the perpetrator as less than human, as an animal. Theories of crime that see criminal
behaviour as innate (genetic/biological) were developed at the end of the nineteenth
century by the Italian criminologist Lombroso and other degeneration theorists.
Criminal conduct was seen as caused by biological or physiological characteristics of
the individual. The biological factors were said to project the individual into a life
of crime. Lombroso argued that criminals were atavistic – that is, genetic throwbacks
to an earlier form of man (sic). While Lombrosian theories of crime are no longer given
wide credence, biological theories continue to have some influence. The psychologist
Hans Eysenck (1971), for example, argues that extraverts are more likely to commit
crime than other types for ultimately biological reasons – differences in neural organ-
isation with behavioural consequences – and Katarina Dalton (1961) has suggested
that some female crime can be explained by hormonal changes during the menstrual
cycle (for instance, by premenstrual tension).
Another way in which we try to account for what appears to be totally incom-
prehensible behaviour is by seeing the perpetrator as mentally sick and suggesting
that he or she is mad and therefore not responsible for his or her actions. Some

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criminological theories have suggested that criminal behaviour is caused by serious

mental pathology or at least is the result of some emotional disturbance. These types
of explanation have been especially prevalent in explaining female criminality, and
we discuss them more fully below. Here we shall note only that while it must be
acknowledged that some lawbreakers may suffer from mental disturbance, the same
can be said of many non-offenders.
A further way in which criminal behaviour is explained is by suggesting that it is
a result of the social conditions in which the offender lives or of life experiences of
individuals. Two sets of explanations are frequently encountered: those that ‘blame’
the socialisation of the individual and the family, and those that see the immediate
‘bad’ social environment as the cause. Thus wife-beating is frequently explained by
reference to the socialisation of the offender in a home in which he either saw his
mother beaten or was beaten himself. Child abuse is sometimes similarly explained,
or sometimes explained by reference to the current living conditions of the family –
for example, living in poverty in one room.
In the 1960s some sociologists began to challenge the idea that it was possible
to establish the causes of social behaviour in the same way that it was possible to
establish causes in the natural sciences, as the theories described above have done.
The positivistic mode of analysis had argued that it was possible to discover the causes
of criminal behaviour in the same way that it is possible to establish laws in physics,
and that it was possible to be value-free and objective about the social world (see
Chapter 13). The ‘new’ criminologists, as they became known, argued that in the guise
of value-freedom sociologists had studied things from the perspective of those with
power in society and had ignored the perspectives of the powerless. Furthermore,
they pointed out that by paying attention to violations of law, criminology had ignored
the legal system and devalued the place of human consciousness and the meaning that
criminal activities had for those engaged in them.
The new criminologists were concerned to examine the relationship between law
and crime, the purpose and function of the legal system and the relatively autonomous
role of individual meaning, choice and volition. Labelling theorists suggested that
if criminals do differ from non-criminals in social characteristics, this is not the
cause of their lawbreaking but because these very characteristics are used by society
to label some people as criminal and ignore others. Maureen Cain (1973) and Steven
Box (1971), for example, suggest that the police are more likely to suspect and
arrest a working-class man than a middle-class one, or a Black young man than a
white one (Hall et al., 1978, and see also the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry – Macpherson
Report, 1999). Furthermore, it was suggested that the only way that criminals differed
from non-criminals was that the former had been involved in the criminal justice
system. Sociologists, then, became concerned to identify the key mechanisms by which
crime is socially constructed through law creation, law enforcement and societal
reaction.
Subsequently some sociologists, from what is called a left realist position (see, for
example, Matthews and Young, 1986), have argued that the new criminology was
idealistic and romanticised the criminal. They point out that the people who suffer
most from criminal acts are working-class people. We can also add that the new
criminology, like most of the old, neglected women and crime. Women are relatively

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powerless, yet these sociologists rarely considered them. Furthermore, women

frequently are the victims of abuse from men, both in the domestic sphere and in public.
While the new deviancy theorists were challenging the view that it is possible to
establish the causes of men’s lawbreaking, their failure to include women in their
analysis meant that biological and pathological explanations continued to be accepted
as explaining female lawbreaking.

Men, women and crime

One of the reasons that ‘women and crime’ has been a neglected area in sociology
is that women appear to be remarkably non-criminal. With the possible exceptions of
shoplifters and prostitutes, women convicted of crime are seen as exceptions and
extreme deviants both from the law and from femininity – that is, acceptable female
behaviour. This is probably, at least in part, because so few women compared with men
are convicted of crimes, but it also relates to what is seen as acceptable behaviour for
women as compared with men. Much male deviance is associated with what it means
to be ‘a man’ – theft using force, fighting in gangs, football violence, and so on.
The British Crime Statistics (published annually for the Home Office) provide
information on convictions for criminal offences. These are broken down by age, sex
and type of offence but not by social class or ethnicity. We can ask three questions
of the statistics which will enable us to begin to determine whether women are less
criminal than men and how female criminality differs from male:

1 Are there differences in the amount of crime committed by men and women?
2 Are there differences in the kinds of crime committed by men and women? and
3 Are there any recent changes in the amount or kind of crime committed by men
and women?

The crime statistics for England and Wales for 2002 (Home Office, 2003) suggest that
women are considerably less criminal than men. This appears to be as true for the
more serious (indictable) offences as for the less serious (summary) ones. (Indictable
offences are those for which an offender has the right to have, or must have, a trial
before a jury in a Crown Court; summary offences are triable only in a Magistrate’s
Court.) Table 10.1 shows that in 2002, 85 per cent of those convicted of indictable
offences were men, and only 15 per cent were women; the proportion of women would
be a little higher (18.5 per cent) if we included cautions as well as convictions, as
women are more likely than men to be cautioned rather than prosecuted, but men
would still form the vast majority. The available evidence suggests that the gender
difference in criminal behaviour is universal – that women are both less likely to be
convicted of crime and likely in general to be convicted of less serious crime than
men, across jurisdictions (Walklate, 2004). (Walklate also points out that men are more
likely to be repeat offenders than women.) The pattern appears to hold true for all
age groups in England and Wales in 2002. Women and girls are more likely than boys
and men to receive only a caution if apprehended by the police, and the difference
increases with age.

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Table 10.1 Persons sentenced or cautioned for indictable offences by sex and age, in England
and Wales, 2002

Age Offences Cautioned Sentenced

no. (000) % (%)

Males Females Total Males Females Males Females

10 and under 14 25.5 9.9 35.4 65 85 85 15

14 and under 17 56.9 13.4 70.3 49 62 85 15
17 and under 21 65.1 11.7 76.8 29 41 87 13
21+ years 242.5 53.4 295.9 19 32 84 16

Total 390.0 88.4 478.4 85 15

Source: Home Office, 2003.

Women are convicted of all categories of crime, but men commit a far higher
number of crimes in all categories (Table 10.2). There are only two categories of crime,
‘Theft and handling stolen goods’ and ‘Fraud and forgery’, where less than 85 per cent
of those convicted were men. Theft and handling stolen goods is the offence for
which both men and women had the highest conviction rates. However, the category
accounted for 53 per cent of all females convicted and only 35 per cent of all men
convicted; 79 per cent of the people convicted in this category were men and 21 per
cent women. Furthermore, other evidence shows that women are mainly convicted
of shoplifting in this category, but that even here men predominate; far more men are
convicted of shoplifting than women.
The statistics on sentencing also suggest that there are differences in the types of
crime committed by men and women. Women/girls are more likely to be given a

Table 10.2 Offenders found guilty of indictable offences at all courts by type of offence, in England
and Wales, 2002 (% by sex)

Offence Males Females

No. (000) % No. (000) %

Violence against the person 33.9 89.9 3.8 10.1

Sexual offences 4.3 97.7 0.1 2.3
Burglary 25.4 95.1 1.3 4.9
Robbery 6.9 89.6 0.8 10.4
Theft and handling stolen goods 100.7 79.1 26.6 20.9
Fraud and forgery 12.9 70.9 5.3 29.1
Criminal damage 9.8 89.1 1.2 10.9
Drug offences 44.3 90.4 4.7 9.6
Other (excluding motoring) 42.1 87.7 5.9 12.3
Motoring offences 7.8 95.1 0.4 4.9

Total 288.1 85.2 50.1 12.8

Source: Home Office, 2003.

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caution by the police than men/boys – 44 per cent of all persons sentenced or
cautioned in 2002, compared with 28 per cent for men – or if brought to court for an
indictable offence then given an absolute or conditional discharge – 23 per cent of
women compared with 13 per cent of men (though the figures even out if we include
all offences) – and substantially less likely to be given immediate custody (Table 10.3).
Men are also likely to receive longer prison sentences than women (Table 10.4).
Proportions committed and average sentence length increased over the ten years
since 1992, with a tendency towards greater increase for women than men, although
the figures for women remain lower than the men’s.
The final question concerns changes in women’s behaviour – Has the number of
women convicted of criminal offences changed in recent years, and how does this
compare with men? Numbers convicted fluctuate from year to year, and trends
are therefore difficult to determine. However, between 1977 and 1986 the number
of women found guilty of crime in England and Wales increased steadily from
207 thousands in 1977 to 277 thousands in 1986 but has since declined to about 251
thousands in 1993 and has remained reasonably stable since then (Walklate, 2004);

Table 10.3 Selected sentences awarded by sex, 2002 (%)

Sentence Indictable offences All offences

Males Females Males Females

(%) (%) (%) (%)

Absolute or conditional discharge 13.2 22.9 9.6 9.6

Fine 24.2 17.9 67.3 74.2
Community sentence 31.8 39.2 13.6 11.0
Suspended custody 0.5 1.0 0.2 0.2
Immediate custody 27.0 15.7 8.9 3.4

Total (000) 286.9 49.8 1161.0 258.6

Source: Home Office, 2003.

Table 10.4 Proportion sentenced to immediate custody and

average term awarded, by sex and court, 2002

Males Females

Proportion awarded immediate custody

Type of court
Magistrates 18 (5) 12 (2)
Crown Court 66 (47) 44 (24)

Average sentence awarded (months)

Type of court
Magistrates 2.5 (2.7) 2.3 (2.2)
Crown Court 27.8 (21.1) 24.7 (17.7)

Source: Home Office, 2003.

Note: bracketed figures are for 1992.

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Table 10.5 Offenders found guilty at all courts by sex and type of offence, in England and Wales,
1977–2001

1977 1981 1985 1989 1993 1997 2001

Males (figures are numbers of offences, in tens of thousands)

Violence 3.9 4.7 4.4 5.1 3.6 3.1 3.2
Sexual offences 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.7 0.4 0.4 0.4
Burglary 6.8 7.4 6.4 4.2 3.9 2.8 2.4
Robbery 0.3 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.5 0.5 0.6
Theft and handling 18.0 18.4 17.4 10.8 10.0 10.5 10.1
Fraud and forgery 1.6 2.0 2.0 1.8 1.4 1.5 1.3
Criminal damage 0.8 1.1 1.1 0.9 0.9 1.0 1.0
Drugs * 1.3 1.7 2.0 2.0 4.4 4.1
Other (excl. motoring) 1.4 1.2 1.7 2.6 3.6 4.2 3.9
Motoring 2.3 2.7 2.8 1.1 1.0 0.8 0.7
Total indictable 35.8 39.9 38.5 30.0 27.0 29.3 27.7
Total summary 138.6 146.6 127.8 101.6 90.4 89.6 87.4
All offences 174.4 186.4 166.2 131.0 117.4 118.8 116.2

Females (figures are numbers of offences, in thousands)

Violence 3.5 4.0 3.6 4.4 3.4 3.6 3.4
Sexual offences <0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.0
Burglary 2.4 2.6 2.2 1.3 1.0 1.1 1.1
Robbery 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.6
Theft and handling 54.0 48.2 42.2 26.6 22.1 26.1 25.8
Fraud and forgery 4.5 5.5 5.4 4.7 3.9 5.6 5.2
Criminal damage 0.6 0.8 0.8 0.7 0.8 1.0 1.0
Drugs * 1.9 2.3 2.4 2.0 5.2 4.5
Other (excl. motoring) 1.7 1.3 1.1 2.1 3.6 5.5 5.3
Motoring 0.8 0.9 0.9 0.4 0.5 0.5 0.4
Total indictable 67.7 65.5 59.0 43.0 37.8 49.0 47.4
Total summary 139.7 175.6 189.3 179.2 213.3 171.0 208.7
All offences 207.4 241.0 248.4 222.2 251.1 220.0 258.8

Source: Home Office, 1987, 1994, 2003.

Note: * figures not available.

put another way, the ratio of male to female offenders fell between 1955 and 1975 from
7.1:1 to 5.2:1 but has remained stable since (Tarling, 1993). See also Table 10.5 for
trends and fluctuations since 1977.
A major problem with the official statistics on convictions is that they tell us only
the numbers arrested and convicted for crimes. There is a large amount of unsolved
crime, and we know nothing about those who perpetrate it. Much of the crime recorded
by the police is never ‘cleared up’ – that is, no one is ever convicted of it. Furthermore,
self-report and victim surveys suggest that there is a large amount of crime that is
never reported to the police. The problem is that we do not know the size or distribution
of this hidden crime. Known crime is like the tip of an iceberg, that which is visible;
research suggests that some crimes, visible ones, are more likely to be reported to and
recorded by the police than hidden crimes, those that take place in private. A mugging
is much more likely to be reported than an assault on a wife, for example. The police

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and public are more likely to suspect some people of crimes than others – working-
class men and ethnic minority men are more likely to be suspected and arrested than
middle-class white men (Box, 1971; Chapman, 1968). The crime statistics do not, then,
represent the ‘real’ amount of crime, nor are those convicted of crime necessarily
representative of all lawbreakers.
We can ask, then, if the differences between the conviction rates of men and
women represent a ‘real’ difference in the lawbreaking of men and women, or just
reflect the fact that women are better at hiding their crimes and less likely to be
suspected of crimes – that is, that they do not fit the stereotype of the criminal. Pollack
(1950) argued that women were not less criminal than men. He argued that women
were naturally good at concealing their actions and naturally secretive because they
had to hide the fact of menstruation. Women commit large amounts of crime that
remain hidden, he argued, especially child abuse and murder of spouses. However,
even if this were the case it seems unlikely that the amount would be sufficient to
increase women’s incidence of lawbreaking to that of men, especially as there is also
hidden male crime, for example male middle-class crime, wife and child abuse, and
other domestic crimes. Self-report studies suggest that women are indeed less criminal
than men (Naffine, 1987). Mawby (1980) found that both young men and young women
in Sheffield admitted to more crime than would seem to be indicated by the official
statistics, but that the ratio of male to female crime seemed about right. Feminists
conclude that on balance the available evidence does indicate that women commit
less, and less serious, crime than men. Also, while there was a period when it was true
that more women became involved in crime, this seems to have been mainly petty
crime, and male crime also increased during the same period (Box and Hale, 1983).
Thus there is no evidence to support the claim that as women become more liberated
they increasingly develop the same patterns of criminality as men.

The need for feminist theory

Feminists have suggested that to understand the issues surrounding women and crime
two key questions need to be considered:

1 Why do so few women commit crimes? and

2 Why do those women who do commit crimes do so?

They suggest that malestream theories have either failed to tackle these questions or
provided inadequate answers.
Thus psycho-positivistic (biological/psychological) theories of female criminality
have stereotyped women and do not provide an adequate explanation. However, they
continue to hold a dominant place in the explanation of female crime long after
they have been seriously challenged as adequate explanations for male criminality.
Thus Hilary Allen (1987) argued that women accused of serious violent crimes are
much more likely than men charged with comparable crimes to be portrayed in court
reports as suffering from psychological problems that suggest they are not responsible
for their actions. Furthermore, women are more likely to be found insane or of

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diminished responsibility and, if convicted, are more likely to be given psychiatric

treatment in place of a penal sentence than are men. Another example is premenstrual
tension (PMT): women have successfully defended themselves against criminal
charges by (being advised to state) a plea of diminished responsibility on the grounds
that they were suffering from PMT at the time they committed the crime. The success
of these pleas, feminists argue, depends not only on the evidence of expert witnesses,
but also on the courts’ preparedness to believe this evidence because it fits their stereo-
type of female criminals. This stereotype has itself been informed, at least in part, by
psycho-positivistic theories of crime, theories which argue that female lawbreakers
are either biologically different from those who do not break the law or that they are
out of their minds – mentally ill – and therefore not responsible for their actions.
Traditional (malestream) sociological theories, on the other hand, have with few
exceptions ignored women. They have not seen gender as an important explanatory
variable and have assumed that theories based on male samples and a male view of
the world can be generalised to women. In some cases they have implicitly or explicitly
accepted biological theories, as for example Durkheim (1897) did in his study of suicide,
when he agreed that women were less likely to commit suicide than men because they
were biologically at a lower stage of development than men and therefore less
influenced by the social forces that resulted in people committing suicide. Even major
critics of conventional criminology failed to raise the issue of women and crime (e.g.
Taylor et al., 1975).

Feminist theories of crime

Feminists have argued that a paradigm shift is essential so that gender can be seen
as an important explanatory variable in understanding why some women are law-
breakers; women have their experiences mediated by gender, race, class relationships,
and so on. They are also agreed that patriarchal relationships, ideologies of femininity
and women’s assigned role in the family all play key roles. While the individual must
be seen as free to shape her own actions, destiny and consciousness, this happens
in an economic, ideological and political environment which she does not control.
Furthermore, it is recognised that empirical studies of women who have engaged in
lawbreaking are essential so that it is possible to determine under what circumstances
women do break the law. An analysis which makes connections between women’s
lawbreaking and how women are handled in the criminal justice system is also essen-
tial. Finally, while the multiple control of women in the class, race and gender system
may explain why most women do not break the law, theories need to be developed
that explain why some women do break it.
The ideology of femininity constructs girls and women in a particular way. The
natural role for women is seen as that of a wife and mother. Girls and women are seen
as needing protection and care. Consequently, young girls tend to be controlled more
than their brothers and given less freedom. Of special concern is the protection of
girls’ virginity (particularly in societies outside of the West – see Therborn, 2004; United
Nations, 2003). While boys are expected to ‘sow their wild oats’, girls are expected to
remain virgins until they marry – or at least to have a ‘steady’ relationship. While young

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men who come before the courts and are handled in the juvenile justice system have
generally committed criminal offences, girls are more likely to come before the courts
for being in need of care and protection, including from their own promiscuity – what
are referred to as ‘status offences’, coming within the ambit of the law only because of
the age of the ‘offender’. This seems to remain true even when the girls have in fact
committed criminal offences.
This alerts us to the important fact that the boundary between normality and
abnormality is elastic – that is, what is seen as normal for men may be seen as abnormal
for women, not to mention class and ethnic variations as well. Crime and deviance are
not immutable but historically and culturally variable. Whether or not behaviour
is seen as criminal/deviant depends both on the context and on the individual doing
the behaviour. The stereotype of the criminal as working class and male, and of
female criminals as being psychologically inadequate, influences not only sociological
theories, but also the people involved in the administration of the criminal justice
system on the one hand and our common-sense view of the nature of women on the
other.
However, studies of women who have been convicted of criminal offences and
who have been imprisoned (e.g. Dobash et al., 1986; Carlen, 1983; Carlen et al., 1985;
Mandaraka-Sheppard, 1986) have confirmed the main feminist criticisms of traditional
criminology. Four major characteristics of female offenders have been highlighted:

1 that women who engage in property crime are motivated by economic factors –
that is, they steal because they need or want the goods they steal;
2 that women commit all types of offences;
3 that women do fear and feel the impact of the stigma of the ‘criminal’ label; and
4 that women are seen as doubly deviant – deviant for breaking social rules, and also
‘unfeminine’ and ‘unnatural’ because they have offended against rules of feminine
behaviour.

Feminists argue that what is necessary is to develop theories that are adequate
for explaining and understanding the lawbreaking of both men and women. This does
not mean that feminists are looking for a universal theory that will explain all criminal
behaviour in all circumstances. There is no reason to assume that all criminal behaviour
can be explained in the same way. What is necessary is theories of crime that take
account of gender, ethnic and class divisions and studies that are situated in the wider
moral, political, economic and sexual spheres which influence women’s and men’s
status and position in society. As Carol Smart (1976) argues, it is necessary to carry
out research on women, in order to make women visible and to find alternative ways
of conceptualising the social world so that the interests and concerns of women are
adduced and included rather than subsumed or ignored.
However, some feminists have argued that existing theories of crime can be
developed to the point where they can account adequately for women. There is no
reason, they suggest, why explanations for female crime should be different from
those for male crime. Morris (1987), for example, argues that disorganisation theory
and differential association can both be extended to account for female crime. Leonard
(1978) has suggested that a reformulated labelling theory with elements of critical

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theory can be developed, and Shaklady Smith (1978) has used labelling theory to
explain female juvenile delinquency.
More recently (see Walklate, 2004) some feminists have indicated a number of
difficulties associated with a position that focuses on women and crime, suggesting that
biological essentialism (sex) is being replaced by a sociological essentialism (gender).
They suggest that it is necessary to problematise masculinity and crime and develop
a gendered understanding of crime and criminal behaviour, rather than one that focuses
either on men or women.

Disorganisation theory

Cloward and Ohlin (1961) argued that crime occurs because not everyone is able to
achieve the accepted goal of society (economic success) by the legitimated means
(hard work), especially via the gaining of educational qualifications. Cloward and
Ohlin suggested that crime happens because, just when working-class adolescents
have been encouraged to adopt a set of economic and material aspirations of which
the larger society approves, the means of achieving these goals is locked off from
them – that is, they do not gain the necessary qualifications to embark on a career that
will enable them to achieve economic success by legitimated means. In reaction to
this, adolescents most at risk of becoming criminals develop an alternative authority
to that of the state – the delinquent gang.
Given that women experience unequal opportunities even more than men, then
this would seem to be a possible explanation for female crime. Indeed, given that
opportunities are more restricted for women than for men, we might expect women
to exhibit a higher rate of crime than men. The fact that they do not can be explained,
however, by their limited access to illegitimate opportunities.
There are major problems with this theory, however. It assumes that there is
universal agreement on societal goals and accepted means of achieving them, and that
crime is committed mainly by working-class men and women. While it is recognised
that there may be differential access to the goals, based on gender as well as class, it
fails to recognise differential access to the means. More important, however, it fails to
take account of the key fact that social goals are different for men and women. Girls
are often socialised into a world that sees marriage, childcare and domesticity as the
main goal (see Chapters 4–6). Indeed, girls who reject the societal view of appropriate
feminine behaviour and who consequently endanger their chances of achieving these
goals are seen as deviant (Lees, 1986).

Differential association

Sutherland (see Sutherland and Cressey, 1966) developed differential association

as a theory of crime as a result of his criticisms of sociological theories of crime which
regarded crime as a male working-class phenomenon. He argued that the official
statistics under-represented middle-class criminals because their crimes were often
dealt with by the civil rather than the criminal courts – or out of court altogether, by

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the ‘private justice’ of employers, clubs and private institutions. Sutherland argued that
criminal behaviour was a result not of poverty or inadequate socialisation, but of the
people with whom one associates. Behaviours, values and justifications were picked
up by association with others. Sutherland argued that people who committed crime
have more contact with those who condoned criminal behaviour than with those who
opposed it. He also suggested that this approach applied equally to women and men.
However, his theory fails to explain why more men than women become criminals; it
does not explain why brothers and not sisters commit crimes, why the wives of criminal
men do not become criminals, and so on.

Critical (Marxist) criminology

Critical criminology has sought to understand the basis of social inequality and power
relationships within capitalist societies. It has explored the class dimension of crime
and has illustrated the ways in which the criminal law is selectively enforced against
the powerless. However, women are not easily accommodated within these accounts,
as women are relatively powerless in capitalist societies and also rarely commit crime.
Thus despite the relatively subordinate social and economic position of women and
their exploitation and domination by men, women appear in the crime statistics much
less frequently than men.
Leonard (1978) and Gregory (1986) argued that Marxist theory needs to be
reformulated so that the considerable impact of gender as well as class position on
crime is taken into account. What is needed, they suggest, is a ‘dual-systems’ theory (see
Chapter 2) that can understand women and crime adequately. A theory is needed that
enables us to understand why women are relatively uninvolved in crime and what
structural factors influence the particular pattern of the crimes in which women
do participate. It is necessary to understand the way that legitimate and illegitimate
means to socially valued goals are different for women than for men and how women’s
associates affect them as compared with men’s. It is necessary to take into account the
ways in which the distribution of wealth and power affect women in capitalist societies
and how this influences their criminality. It is necessary to consider why women who
are relatively powerless are nonetheless infrequently labelled criminal. Finally, it is
necessary to consider what role women play in a class society, the difference in the
oppression of working-class women and working-class men, and the way in which
women are controlled and handled in the legal system and in society generally.
Using a dual-systems perspective, Dee Cook (1987) has studied women who
committed fraud against the supplementary benefit system. She argued that the
majority of women claiming supplementary benefit are single-parent mothers. They
are seen as deviant because they are not living in families that conform to ideas of
a normal family in capitalist societies (see Chapter 6). The major reason for these
women fiddling supplementary benefit, she argues, is economic necessity. When they
are caught for fiddling they provoke a negative reaction because of their deviant
personal status as well as because of their criminal acts. Social security fiddling for
women is seen within a framework that takes into account their class situation and
patriarchal ideology.

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Labelling theory

Leonard (1978) argued that labelling theory is potentially valuable for understanding
female crime. Using labelling theory it is possible to look at the inherent bias in the law,
its relativity, and the different ways in which it is enforced. Within such a framework
it would also be possible to examine social reaction to female criminals and how this
influenced their self-definitions.
Labelling theory developed in the 1960s as one response to positivistic crimi-
nology. It was argued that crime was caused by a number of factors, that it was
impossible to obtain a representative sample of people who commit crimes from which
to generalise, and that deviancy theorists should concentrate on studying societal
reaction to crimes and criminals and how labelling as an outsider resulted in changes
in self-identity. Labelling theorists also argued that crime and deviance were relative
and not universal categories. Finally, they rejected the view that value-free research
was possible in the social sciences and argued that it was important to look at things
from the perspective of the underdog.
Labelling theorists have been criticised for ignoring female deviance and
crime. Milkman (1976) suggested that while labelling theorists presented sympathetic
accounts of male deviants, they failed to do so for female ones. She points out that
labelling theorists have portrayed prostitutes, for example, in a stereotypical way and
through the eyes of ‘punters and pimps’ rather than through their own self-perceptions.
However, labelling theory has been used by feminists carrying out research on
young people. Sue Lees, in her study of teenage girls (1986), argued that the ways in
which young men and young women label young women act as a powerful mechanism
of social control (see Chapters 4 and 5). Shaklady Smith (1978), in a small ethnographic
study of teenage girls, argues that labelling theory can be used to understand the
pattern of female delinquent activities. Using open-ended interviews she studied three
groups of young women in the Bristol area in 1970 – 30 girls on probation orders, 15
girl members of gangs and 30 girls who had never been referred to any agency dealing
with juvenile delinquency, as similar as possible to the first group. She found that girls
committed all the kinds of offences with which young men, but not girls, are usually
associated; for example, 67 per cent of the probation group and 73 per cent of the gang
sample had deliberately damaged property (see Table 10.6). An analysis of the
responses of the gang and probation samples demonstrated that many of them had
committed most of the offences for which male juveniles are usually taken to the courts.
However, an analysis of court records suggests that girls are much more likely to
be brought before the court as in need of care and protection than as charged with
offences, but if charged are more likely to be given a custodial sentence.
Her data also suggest that girls tend either to be conformist or very delinquent.
Girl delinquents were labelled, she argues, by parents, teachers and non-delinquent girls
alike as unfeminine and to be disapproved of. However, the labelling of them by others
as unfeminine did not result in further status loss, nor did they become promiscuous.
Rather, they responded with aggressive behaviour and remained popular among their
peers. Nonetheless they did suffer a double rejection; they were rejected both on
account of their violation of the law and because they rejected femininity. The girls saw
themselves as tough, dominant and tomboyish.

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Table 10.6 Self-report of delinquent acts and offences committed by girls in research
by Shaklady Smith (1978)

Type of offence Control sample Probation Gang

sample sample

Total numbers: 30 30 15
% % %

Skipped school 63.3 90.0 93.3

Shoplifting 36.7 90.0 80.0
Breaking and entering 10.0 33.3 26.7
In car without owner’s permission 16.7 60.0 60.0
Deliberate property damage 26.7 66.7 73.3
Running away from home 3.3 76.0 53.3
Sex under age of consent 13.3 70.0 73.3
Taken drugs 3.3 10.0 33.2
Taken part in a fight 23.3 63.3 73.3

Source: Shaklady Smith, 1978.

Once labelled, these girls became isolated from their normal peers; parents of
non-delinquent girls forbade their daughters to mix with the girl juvenile delinquents.
The girls became more and more dependent on the delinquent group:

social definitions of female delinquency lead not so much to a total rejection

of femininity in that a male role is aspired to, as a rejection of certain elements of
the culturally stereotyped female role which is perceived by the girls as too
constraining.
(Shaklady Smith, 1978, p. 84)

Labelling propelled them into more extreme forms of delinquency. Shaklady Smith
suggests that the protective attitudes of probation officers, social workers and other
agencies paradoxically resulted in the same labelling of behaviour as ‘common’ or
‘sluttish’. Long before they reached court girl juvenile delinquents had ‘experienced a
continued defining process which classified them as unfeminine’.
Carlen et al. (1985) have also shown the ways in which labelling influences the
patterns of female crime and the ways in which female criminals are labelled un-
feminine. However, labelling theory does not explain why people become criminal in
the first place, nor does it take full account of power relations between various social
groups and in different social contexts.

Social control theory

Heidensohn (1986) has suggested that the question we should be asking is not why
some women commit crime, but why women are so non-criminal. In other words, we
should be explaining why women do not become criminal. She suggests that the reason
is because of the ways in which women are controlled. She argues that women are

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controlled within the family and within society generally. She suggests that there are
two types of theory of social control. Some theories emphasise the ways in which
societies are cemented together by a shared value system. These values or ideologies
are transmitted via the media, the educational system, the family, courts, police, and
so on. A second type of theory emphasises bonding in relationship to the family, the
peer group and the school, whereby people are bound into society’s norms and values.
Thus women are controlled by ideologies of appropriate behaviour for women and by
their role in the family.
However, Pat Carlen (in Carlen and Worrall, 1987) has suggested that the problem
with control theory is that it does not explain why some women do become criminal.
She attempts to develop feminist control theory so that it can do this. She suggests that:

1 Women generally conform while they perceive it to be worth while to do so. Such
calculation takes into account the costs and benefits of criminal behaviour.
2 Working-class women are controlled within two areas, the workplace and the family
– that is, they are doubly controlled. They thus have to make a ‘class deal’ – to
accept a wage for work; and a ‘gender deal’ – to take on feminine behaviour.
3 Most working-class women make the class deal and the gender deal because the
exploitative nature of these two deals is obscured by the ideology of familialism and
community working together in women to engender an attraction to the (imaginary)
norm of respectable working-class womanhood.
4 A commitment to the norms of respectable working-class womanhood is most
likely to happen where girls are brought up in families where there is a male bread-
winner and a female carer – although girls can learn appropriate behaviour from
the mass media, especially women’s magazines and pop songs which report
marriage coupled with a wage-earning job as a deal to which young women should
aspire. Thus the woman most likely to become criminal is one brought up in care
or taken into care in adolescence.
5 The majority of women are not criminalised even when caught breaking the law.
While they remain in the family as a daughter or wife they are seen as having made
the gender deal. It is unassimilated women, women who have been in care or
rejected ‘normal’ family life, who are likely to be seen as recidivist lawbreakers.
6 Women who see themselves as marginalised and consequently have nothing to lose
may turn to lawbreaking and see it as preferable to poverty and social isolation.

Social control theory emphasises the ways in which girls and women are con-
trolled within both the public and the private spheres and how they are therefore likely
to be more conformist than men. The stereotype of women and a woman’s role plays
an important part in explaining the ways in which the control of women is achieved.
These assumptions underlie the law governing sexual behaviour, the social benefit
system, the interventions of health visitors and the ways in which the criminal justice
system handles and disposes of female offenders. The normal woman is seen as a wife
and mother who is in need of protection, while the deviant woman is seen as needing
to be trained to perform domestic tasks and childcare. However, it is evident that more
research needs to be carried out before we can answer the key questions that have
been raised concerning women and crime: explanations for the patterning of crime;

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explanations for why women’s crime differs so much from men’s; and assessment of
how far and in what ways gender differences in crime are linked to class, age and race.
However, it is clear that explanations which see female crime as a result of a
failure of individual women to adapt themselves to their supposedly natural biological
role are inadequate and misleading. Women’s behaviour, criminal and non-criminal,
needs to be explained by reference to a social formation which imposes restrictive and
exploitative roles on women. Furthermore, it must be recognised that in certain
economic and ideological circumstances crime may be a rational and coherent
response to women’s awareness of the social constraints imposed on them by their
social roles and identities.

Radical feminist perspectives on crime

Radical feminists have paid more attention to analysing crimes of which women
are victims rather than looking at female criminality – that is, to manifestations of male
power, and especially to domestic violence, rape, pornography and prostitution.
However, a radical feminist account would emphasise patriarchal power relationships
and women’s exploitation and subordinate position in examining female crime,
emphasising that the locus of male power is sexuality.
Sue Edwards (1987) carried out research into women and prostitution. She argues
that explanations for why women become prostitutes are an extension of explanations
of the oppression and exploitation of women in patriarchal society; she suggests that
girls and young women enter prostitution because of women’s low earning potential,
a decline in job opportunities for women and the erosion of welfare benefits. Prostitutes,
she argues, are harassed by the police if they walk the streets and are controlled by
pimps if they work off-street. While women prostitutes face high risks of prosecution
or exploitation, their pimps and clients and others benefiting from prostitution remain
relatively free to exploit prostitute women, as they are placed in an increasingly vul-
nerable position in both the law and the economy.
In sum, most theories of deviance have been developed to account for male crime
and deviance. Women appear less often in official statistics of crime, and the evidence
suggests that they do in fact commit fewer crimes. The pattern and nature of their
crimes are likewise different from men’s. Feminists have tried to extend malestream
theories of deviance – such as the labelling perspective – to fit female crime. However,
they have also highlighted the importance of taking other factors into account – such
as the economic position of women, and their role in the family – in understanding
women’s crimes.

Violence, fear and social control

Research on victims of crime and fear of crime indicates that while those most at risk
of being victims are young men, those who have the greatest fear of crime are young
women. Women of all ages express more fear of crime than men (Tables 10.7–10.9).
Criminologists have argued that while women have an exaggerated fear of crime,

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young men either ignore or do not recognise their risk. However, feminists have argued
that what women fear is sexual crime and that they do so with good reason. Women
are at risk of sexual crimes from both strangers and those they know, in public
and private space. Women are at risk of sexual harassment, stranger rape, date
rape, partner rape, domestic violence, wife murder and mugging. They are aware
of the consequences of their behaviour in public and private and they act to minimise
the possibility of violent/sexual attack. They police their own behaviour – where
they go, what they wear, how they behave and how they interact with men (Walklate,
2004).

Table 10.7 Fear of crime1: sex, age and type of crime

Males Females

16–29 30–59 60+ All 16–29 30–59 60+ All

Theft of car2 22 18 10 10 27 21 21 22
Theft from car 19 16 15 16 18 15 15 16
Burglary 17 16 15 16 23 21 22 22
Mugging 12 19 12 11 24 21 25 23
Physical attack 11 8 8 9 33 26 23 27
Rape 12 7 4 7 37 29 24 29

Source: British Crime Survey, 2000.

Notes:
1 Describing self as ‘very worried’.
2 Car owners only.

Table 10.8 Feeling unsafe at night (%) by country

Alone at home Walking alone

Males Females Males Females

England — 2 5 21
Wales 1 2 3 17
Scotland — 2 4 16
Northern Ireland — 2 5 16

Source: British Crime Survey, 2002/3.

Table 10.9 Objective risk of violent crime – selected age ranges

Age range Males Females

16–24 15.1 6.9

45–64 2.7 2.0
75+ 0.4 0.6

Source: British Crime Survey, 2002/3.

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Crimes against women

Women are likely to be victims of all forms of crime, but they are especially vulnerable
to violent attacks by men, both sexual and physical and by the men with whom they
live as well as men not previously known to them. It is not just that women are the
victims of violent men, but that fear of violent crime is a powerful control over women’s
lives. Research has consistently suggested that violence against women is the most
pervasive human rights violation in the world.
Women experience three types of violence from men: gender harassment (sexist
and derogatory comments and jokes about women – on the street, at work, and so on);
unwanted sexual attention (unsolicited sexual remarks and/or sexual touching, and
so on) and sexual compulsion (including all forms of forced sex or other physical
attack – rape, murder, forced prostitution, clitoridectomy, and so on).
It is estimated that 130 million women and girls have undergone clitoridectomy
– a practice designed to enable a man to know that his new bride is a virgin. In a
trade estimated to be worth $76 million annually, between 700,000 and 4 million
women are trafficked for commercial sex work (UN, 2003; see also Therborn, 2004).
In the Rwandan genocide of 1994, women and girls were raped, often by men who
knew they were HIV positive. In India and China sex selection and the killing of baby
girls occurs because of preference for boys, and in India women are killed by their
husbands because their families are unable to meet continuing demands for dowries
(Therborn, 2004). In 48 surveys from around the world between 10 and 69 per cent of
women reported being physically assaulted by male partners at some point in their lives
(www.who.org).
In the UK, 25 per cent of all violent crime is ‘wife assault’ (Home Office, 1999).
Stanko et al. (1997) found in their survey that one in nine women had experienced
domestic violence in the previous year, and the British Crime Survey estimates
that 25 per cent of women will be assaulted by a male partner at some point during
their lives. Of all female murder victims in the UK, 45 per cent are killed by a current
(or former) male partner; the figure for men is 8 per cent. Contrary to popular views,
women do not invite violence; indeed, they often shape their behaviour to reduce
the possibility. Also, women are likely to blame themselves; for example, less than
two-thirds of female rape victims are prepared to classify their experience as rape
(Myhill and Allen, 2002), preferring to classify it as ‘pressured sex’ rather than ‘coerced
sex’ (Walklate, 2004). Men continue to believe that it is acceptable for women to be
chattels; research in the UK, for example, found that half of young men aged 14–21
thought that in some circumstances it was acceptable to hit a woman or force her to
have sex (ESRC, 2002).
Feminists have been interested not only in explaining why men are violent towards
women, but in exposing the ways in which women who have been attacked by men
are treated in the criminal justice system and by welfare agencies. Frequently, it
is argued, women who have been assaulted, whether physically or sexually, end up
feeling that they themselves are to blame. Indeed, attacks on women are frequently
explained by saying that ‘she deserved it’ – for example, rape victims are blamed
because they went out late at night alone, or wives who have been beaten by their
husbands are blamed because they failed in their wifely duties, or daughters who

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are the victims of incest are said to have tempted their fathers or brothers with their
flirtatious behaviour.
Sue Lees (1989) has analysed cases in which men have pleaded provocation as
a mitigating circumstance when they are being tried for killing a wife, lover or former
lover. (A successful plea of provocation means that the jury returns a verdict of
manslaughter rather than murder. Murder carries a mandatory life sentence, but for
manslaughter a judge can give any sentence from a conditional – or even in theory
an absolute – discharge to life imprisonment.) Lees quotes a number of cases in which
male killers who have used the plea of provocation have been given relatively light
prison sentences on being found guilty of manslaughter. She argues that the evidence
for provocation is often based on the uncorroborated assertion of the accused and his
friends, and that verdicts of manslaughter (unpremeditated killing) are often brought
in even when there is evidence of premeditation. She points out that if a man kills his
wife on finding her in bed with another man he can successfully plead provocation and
be found guilty of manslaughter. She suggests that:

The concept of provocation is based on three very questionable assumptions.

Firstly, that a reasonable man can be provoked into murder by insubordinate
behaviour – infidelity, bad housekeeping, withdrawal of sexual services and even
nagging . . . The law provides for a legitimation for men to behave violently in
the face of insubordination or marriage breakdown. . . . If it can be successfully
alleged that the victim was unrespectable, negligent in her wifely duties, then
provocation is usually accepted. Secondly, the idea that women can be similarly
provoked even when they have been beaten up or raped is seldom entertained.
This would be a ‘licence to kill’ rapists or wife batterers. Thirdly, although the main
distinction between murder and manslaughter revolves around whether the
killing is premeditated or not (‘malice aforethought’, or intention to kill, is murder,
but if someone kills by accident or through negligence, or is provoked, it is man-
slaughter) a defence of provocation on the basis of ‘loss of self-control’ in practice
. . . often over-rides evidence of premeditation.
(Lees, 1989, pp. 2–3)

Three major forms of explanation of violence towards women have been

developed – the first two within malestream theory, and the third (by feminists) as a
critique of the malestream theories and an alternative, feminist account:

1 From a traditional perspective crimes such as rape and assault on wives are seen
as infrequent. While not all women are seen as the cause of the violent behaviour,
many are. Thus rape victims are said to have enticed the rapist and ‘caused’ him to
have uncontrollable sexual urges. This can be either because of their behaviour in
public places or by ‘leading on’ the man with whom they have been out, encouraging
him to expect that he will be given sex. It is accepted that some victims are innocent,
but they are expected to demonstrate this by resisting the attack and showing
considerable evidence of physical injury.
Assaults on wives are also seen as being deserved by the wife for failing in
her duties, and men are assumed to have responsibility for controlling their wives.

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Indeed, until the nineteenth century in England the debate concerned not whether
a man could beat his wife but how much he could beat her. It was not until the end
of the nineteenth century that assaults on wives became illegal. In the traditionalist
perspective, as with rape, it is accepted that some men beat their wives without just
cause, but this is thought to be a relatively small proportion.
2 Liberal/psychiatric perspectives accept that violence towards women is a social
problem, but see it again as a relatively minor problem. In this view either the male
perpetrator is seen as sick or disturbed or the female victim is seen as seeking out
violence. Thus for rape, the rapist is seen as mentally ill or socially inadequate, or
female victims are said to be masochistic. Similarly, men who beat their wives are
said either to have been brought up in a home where they were battered as children
or to beat their wives as a result of being drunk, or the wives are said to want to be
beaten. In this perspective men who are violent to women are seen as sick and as
needing treatment, or to be the ‘victims’ of women who invite violence.
3 Feminist perspectives locate violence to women by men within the broader context
of women’s position as subordinate to men. In the 1970s feminists tended to try to
explain rape and assaults on wives as serious indications of men’s violence towards
women. However, more recently feminists have broadened this view and suggest
that anything that frightens or intimidates women must be seen in the context of
men’s control of women’s behaviour. Thus women’s fear of violence acts to control
their behaviour, so that they restrict and limit their activities, and if they do go out
at night they place themselves in the protection of a man. Furthermore, the advice
to women is always not to go out when another woman has been raped in an area;
it is never suggested that men should stay in so that it is safe for women to go out.
Feminists have also become more concerned with doing research that explores
how women experience male violence and power and how fear of rape and attacks
from men restrict their behaviour, rather than in developing explanations for male
violence. Feminist research has also demonstrated the limited value of legal reforms
aimed at helping women who are the victims of male violence and the failure of the
police and the courts to deal adequately with such men.

Until the 1970s the victimisation of women by men remained relatively hidden.
(See Chapter 11, however, for the nineteenth-century feminist campaigns around
these issues.) With the rise of second wave feminism, the extent of assaults on wives,
of rape and of child sexual abuse became more evident. Women have become more
prepared to report men who commit violence against them and, more importantly,
welfare agencies, the police and the courts have become more prepared to believe
women and children. However, feminists argue that the extent of these crimes is still
grossly underestimated and that the criminal justice system is still reluctant to accept
how widespread violence against women and children is and to deal with the offenders.
Feminists argue that rape and assaults on wives are serious crimes and should be
treated as such. The perpetrators of these crimes should be charged and punished in
the same way as they would be for any other serious violent crime.

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Rape

Feminists argue that:

the fear of rape affects all women. It inhibits their actions and limits their freedom,
influencing the way they dress, the hours they keep, the routes they walk. The
fear is well founded, because no woman is immune from rape.
(Clarke and Lewis, 1977, p. 23)

In Britain until 1994 rape was defined in law as unlawful sexual intercourse, which
in turn meant that the penis had to penetrate the vagina and therefore that only women
could be raped. However, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 widened
the definition to include non-consensual penetration of the anus by the penis, so that
a man committed rape if:

1 he had sexual intercourse with a person (whether vaginally or anally) who at the time
of intercourse did not consent to it; and
2 at the time he knew that the person did not consent to the intercourse or he was
reckless as to whether the person consented to it.

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 further widened the definition of what constitutes rape.
This Act states that a person (A) commits an offence if

a) he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his
penis,
b) B does not consent to that penetration, and
c) A does not ‘reasonably believe’ that B consents.

Whether a belief is ‘reasonable’ is to be determined having regard to all the circum-

stances, including any steps A has taken to ascertain whether B consents.
In Britain until 1990 a man could not be charged with raping his wife, as the law
assumed that the marriage contract gave him the right to have sexual intercourse with
her. (Although the law has not been changed to make it a criminal offence, it has now
become established in case law through convictions in the courts.)
Feminists have been concerned to examine three issues: first, to ask why rape
occurs and what attitudes and beliefs support it, second to examine the social and legal
constraints which prevent women obtaining their legal rights, and third, to understand
the experience of rape victims.
Rape is commonly viewed as the outcome of the male sex drive – that men have
uncontrollable sexual urges. However, Barbara Toner (1977) suggests that the anthro-
pological evidence shows that the strength of the male sex drive depends on cultural
attitudes and values. She points out that amongst the Arapesh of New Guinea rape is
virtually unknown, while amongst the Gusii of Kenya it is a major form of social control
of women by men.

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Feminists argue that rape is an act of violence and domination which devalues and
dehumanises the victim. Susan Brownmiller (1976), a radical feminist, argues that men
are natural predators and women their natural prey. Men have the ability to rape
women, but women cannot easily retaliate in kind. Rape, she argues, is used by men
to generate fear in all women, and this is a conscious process of intimidation. Women,
she argues, continue to be subordinated by men through the threat of rape. Women will
be able to overcome their subordination only when they are fully integrated into
the state apparatus for legislating against rape and for enforcing that legislation. The
state will then be able to protect women from rape. In this view the cause of rape is
male sexuality itself, and the solution sometimes advocated is political lesbianism (for
a discussion of feminist debates on political lesbianism and resistance to male sexual
violence see Jackson and Scott, 1996).
Many feminists, however, reject biological explanations for rape and argue that
rape is sustained and justified by patriarchal ideology and patriarchal relations. Lynne
Segal (1987), for example, suggests that the problem is masculinity – that male sexual
violence is about social roles and gender, not essential biological characteristics such
as innate violence and/or uncontrollable sexual urges. Convicted rapists have been
found to exhibit a range of motivations, from wanting to control women to excitement
from impersonal sex (Scully and Marolla, 1993), revealing the cultural roots of attitudes
towards sex and aggression embedded in masculinity. Feminists argue that patri-
archal ideology defines women as either mothers who are respected or sexual objects
for men’s pleasure. Men want to gain sexual possession of women, and men control
women’s sexuality for their own purposes. They argue that while patriarchal ideology
overtly condemns rape, it covertly legitimates it by viewing it as normal. In courts of
law rapists often use the excuse, successfully, that the victim ‘asked for it’. Furthermore,
feminists argue that the rape law is concerned to protect the interests of men as much
as the honour of women. Rape is viewed as a crime against property – daughters and
wives; the father’s/husband’s property is damaged. Rape, they argue, is a political
act that takes away a woman’s autonomy to decide what to do with her own body. It
is an act of aggression which carries with it the threat of death. Rape victims are chosen
indiscriminately, in that no woman is immune from rape. Rape teaches all women that
they are subordinate to men and it keeps women in a state of fear. It is thus an effective
way of controlling women and restricting their freedom.
However, Joni Lovenduski and Vicky Randall (1993) point to the ways in which
women in Leeds actually rejected the attempts by police and others to control their
behaviour as a result of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders. They argue that while ‘a lot
of women were controlled by the “Ripper” murders: they gave up jobs and evening
classes, women students left university and returned to homes in other parts of the
country’, other women acted differently and ‘organised life for each other and lent
each other their guard dogs. Instead of a siege mentality, there was the development
of a sense of collective strength, a sense of shared experience’ (pp. 331–332).
Feminists argue that the victims of rape are frequently ‘put on trial’ by the court
procedures and blamed for the crime themselves. This is especially the case if the
woman leads a sexually active life or her behaviour is seen as having ‘caused’ the rape
by, for example, hitching a lift at night. Recent changes in the law so that a woman’s
sex life could not automatically be examined in court have not protected women from

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this, as most judges have in practice given permission for the woman to be questioned
about her sexual history (Edwards, 1984). Helen Kennedy QC has pointed out that:

In rape trials women are asked all sorts of irrelevant and inappropriate questions
which have nothing to do with the crime – and which are never put to men.
Barristers home-in on their lifestyle to show that they encourage rape.
(quoted in Bouquet, 1995, p. 46)

Sue Lees has argued in this respect that: ‘Women who are brave enough to take their
cases to court go through a form of judicial rape. They are subjected to ruthless
character assassination and humiliation’ (quoted in Bouquet, 1995, p. 46).
Carol Smart (1995) has argued that actors in rape trials share a view of sexuality
which emphasises the pleasure of penetration and intercourse. The assumption, then,
is that rape must be pleasurable for women because it involves penetration. Rape trials
often centre on the meaning of the word ‘no’. The court, Smart argues, shares an
understanding that women are capricious about sex and may say ‘no’ when they mean
‘yes’. The key issue becomes whether a woman’s ‘no’ meant ‘no’. Clearly this issue is
central to what has become known as ‘date’ as opposed to ‘stranger’ rape. In the former
case it is frequently argued that the woman ‘really’ wanted sex, that she has clearly
indicated this despite the fact that she said ‘no’.
Also, in rape trials the rules of corroboration play a key role. Until the Criminal
Justice Act 1994 juries were warned by the judge that it was dangerous to convict
on the uncorroborated evidence of the complainant, but that they might do so if they
were satisfied that it was true. The dangers of convicting on the basis of uncorroborated
evidence are present in all trials, but the law required the jury to be warned of this
only in rape trials, treason trials and when the evidence has been given by children or
accomplices. In rape trials the implied insult, that rape victims were no more reliable
as witnesses than children or accomplices, was compounded by the jury being told that
the experience of the courts was that women accuse men of rape for totally malicious
reasons and innocent men must be protected from such allegations. Given that there
are rarely witnesses to rape, and often the victim’s and accused’s accounts differ only
as to whether she consented to sexual intercourse, rape convictions are difficult
to obtain unless there is corroborative evidence – for example, if the victim received
injuries. Indeed, Home Office research has indicated that rapists are rarely convicted
and imprisoned unless the victim is sexually inexperienced, was raped by a stranger
and sustained injuries (Bouquet, 1995).
Indeed, long before the crime comes to trial women are often degraded and
disbelieved. Women are reluctant to report rape in the first place because of the ways
in which rape victims are questioned by the police and the ways in which medical
examinations are carried out. The police are less likely to believe the rape allegation
of some women than others. For example, Ann Burgess and Linda Holmstrom (1979)
studied the cases of 146 women and girls who reported to a hospital emergency room
(casualty reception) in the US as having been raped. They suggest that the responses
of the police and the decision as to whether to prosecute or not were based on
stereotypes of rape. The woman was believed and the police carried out an inves-
tigation if the woman was previously a virgin, if she was judged emotionally stable, if

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the rapist was a stranger and if the rapist used or threatened to use a weapon. The case
was dropped if the victim had gone willingly, if she was unmarried and sexually
experienced, if she had emotional problems, if she was calm when she was making the
report and if the rapist was known to her.
Barbara Toner (1977) found that the police in Britain held similar stereotypes of
rape. Women reporting rape are more likely to be taken seriously if they report the
offence immediately, are upset, did not know the rapist and showed signs of having
put up a struggle. (However, feminists have suggested that women do not want to
be beaten, and victims of rape have often said that they were too frightened to resist
and that they were afraid they would be killed if they did.) Toner found that women
who reported rape often felt they were treated unsympathetically by the police and
found the medical inspection conducted in an insultingly matter-of-fact way. Research
carried out for Thames Valley Police by Oxford Brookes University in 1994 found that
only a fifth of rape victims reported the crime to the police. Over half of the victims
thought they were unlikely to be treated fairly by the courts (Bouquet, 1995). Catharine
MacKinnon (1987) has suggested that women do not report rape or at least do not
proceed with allegations because of the type of evidence that they will be required to
give in court.
Feminists have challenged a number of myths about rape:

1 Rape is widely believed to be impossible. It is argued that women can always

avoid being raped by running away or resisting and fighting back. This ignores
the aspect of fear, that women are too frightened to run away and are scared of the
consequences if they resist.
2 It is believed that women enjoy rape. However, studies of women who have been
raped suggest that they felt humiliated and frightened. Also, men benefit from the
belief that women want intercourse.
3 It is believed that rape is a rare act. However, victim studies and the experience of
Rape Crisis centres suggests that only a small number of rapes are reported to the
police. Ruth Hall (1985), in the only published UK incidence report, found
prevalence figures of 17 per cent for rape and 20 per cent for attempted rape.
4 It is believed that rape is committed by strangers. Statistics show that the rapist is
as likely to be known to the victim as to be a stranger. Also, rapes are as likely to
happen indoors as in the open. For example, Amir (1971) found that 57 per cent of
rapists were known to their victims.
5 It is believed that rape is committed only by psychopaths. However, studies suggest
that few convicted rapists are mentally abnormal. Carol and Barry Smart (1978)
point out that rapists are not treated differently from other offenders by the legal
system and generally receive short sentences, and that few are dealt with under the
mental health legislation. Furthermore, the criminal records of convicted rapists
often include non-sexual as well as sexual crimes.
6 It is believed that rape is an impulsive act, the result of uncontrollable sexual urges
and unplanned. Women are said to ‘cause’ the urges which men cannot control.
However, research has demonstrated that most rapes are planned. For example,
Amir (1971) found that 70 per cent were planned, 11 per cent partially planned and
only 16 per cent what he called ‘explosive’.

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7 It is believed that rape is a problem of the lower classes. However, men of all ages,
all social classes and all ethnic groups attack and rape women.

Assaults on wives and partners

The extent to which wives are violently assaulted became evident in the early 1970s
when women’s liberation groups began to respond to the obvious need for refuges for
women who wanted to leave violent men (see Chapter 6). As Dobash and Dobash
observe:

In 1971 almost no one had heard of battered women, except of course the legions
of women who were being battered and the relatives, friends, ministers, social
workers, doctors and lawyers in whom some of them confided. Many people did
not believe that such behaviour actually existed, and even most of those who were
aware of it did not think that it affected sufficient numbers of women or was of
sufficient severity to warrant wide-scale concern.
(Dobash and Dobash, 1980, p. 2)

Domestic violence occurs across all social classes, all kinds of family circumstances
and all localities (Mirrlees-Black, 1999). The UK police receive the equivalent of one
call a minute asking for assistance with domestic violence, only 5 per cent of which
include a male victim (ESRC, 2002).
The women who come to refuges – about 12,000 in any one year in the UK
(Lovenduski and Randall, 1993) – have often been living with men who have beaten
them violently for years. Many have tried unsuccessfully to leave their husbands or
partners on a number of occasions, but the problem of finding accommodation and
supporting themselves and their children has frequently driven them back to the violent
home. Welfare agencies, the police and the courts were seen as at best unhelpful and
at worst likely to advise them to ‘make the best of it’.
This comes about at least in part because violence in the family often continues
to be seen as a private affair, something to be sorted out by the husband and wife
themselves, rather than something needing intervention by welfare agencies, the police
and the courts. The police frequently refer to such incidents as ‘domestic’ rather than
regarding them as serious cases of assault. Furthermore, calling them domestic shifts
the blame for the violence from the husband to the husband-and-wife and normalises
it as part of family life. Police reluctance to take assaults on wives seriously is also
evidenced by their reluctance to charge husbands with assault and take them to court.
They argue that this is because wives usually refuse to testify and forgive their
husbands. However, evidence from states in the US where police are required to
charge husbands who assault wives does not support this contention, and nor does
research in Britain that has examined this ‘attrition rate’. In Britain the practice of ‘no
criming’ domestic disputes is gradually being abandoned (Edwards, 1989; Bourlet,
1990). (In practice, however, the change had to be underpinned by training in consistent
practice (Walklate, 2004).) A series of Home Office memos to police forces between
1983 and 1990 instructed them to take domestic violence more seriously, and in 1991

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the Home Office instructed police forces to set up data-banks of women at risk. The
response of police forces, organised regionally, has been mixed, with a few forces
having very good practices and others having apparently made no changes. In some
forces there are no Police Domestic Violence Units, while in others not only are there
such Units, but domestic assault on women is treated as seriously as assaults on
strangers (Lovenduski and Randall, 1993; Walklate, 2004).
In the US it is estimated that between two and four million and possibly as
many as eight million women are battered every year by the men with whom they
live (Sassetti, 1993). It is likely that it is the single greatest cause of serious injury
to women, accounting for more injuries than car accidents, muggings and rape
combined. Domestic violence also accounts for between 30 and 40 per cent of
female murder victims in the US every year (see Chapter 6). Some 25 per cent of all
violent assaults in Britain are domestic assaults on women, over a thousand women
a week in London alone telephone the police with a domestic violence complaint
(Lovenduski and Randall, 1993), and one in five murder victims is a woman
killed by her partner or ex-partner (Smith, 1989). Research into domestic violence
indicates that in the overwhelming majority of cases men are the perpetrators and
women the victims (Smith, 1989), and this holds true for different ethnic and cultural
groups. Mama (1989) has indicated that ‘the prevalence of violence against women
in Black communities illustrates the full meaning of triple oppression along the
dimensions of race, class and gender’ (p. vii). Mama, like the Southall Black Sisters
(Sahgal, 1989), has been critical of pressures put on Black women to keep quiet about
their experiences of male violence. Indeed, she argues that because of the focus on
fighting against police violence it took ‘a long time to address a reality in which black
women are more likely to be assaulted by their male partners than to be attacked by
racists’ (p. 16).
Most research into assaults on wives has been carried out by interviewing women
in refuges. In the main the research has been carried out by academics. Indeed, the
Department of Health and Social Security has been criticised for commissioning
research on wife-assault from academics rather than involving the women in the refuge
movement, it being suggested that the DHSS spent large sums of money on research
that could better have been spent helping the victims of abuse (Hanmer and Leonard,
1984). The findings of research, they suggest, have added little that the women in the
refuges did not know already.
Feminist researchers have rejected individualistic explanations for domestic
violence. The largest single feminist study of wife-beating was carried out by Rebecca
and Russell Dobash (1980) in Scotland. They argued that the problem of violence
against women is a deep-rooted societal one arising out of the patriarchal family
system, a system in which the husband’s authority over the wife creates a particular
marriage power relationship and a subordinate position for wives and mothers. They
argued that men are more powerful than women and exploit the labour of women
in marriage – that is, women are expected to serve their husbands by providing
domestic services for them. They argue that one of the major factors precipitating
male violence to their wives is husbands’ perceptions that a wife is not performing her
wifely duties satisfactorily – for example, a house not cleaned properly, a meal not
prepared promptly, or a wife suspected of not being sexually faithful. Jan Pahl (1985),

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in her research, also found that men who beat their wives had frequently tried to control
their behaviour and expected them to stay at home and not go out alone. Henrietta
Moore (1995) has suggested that interpersonal violence can always be seen as evidence
of the struggle for the maintenance of power – in this case, the power of men to control
women.
Feminist researchers have also explored why women find it so difficult to leave
violent men. They argue that there are economic, social, ideological and legal factors
which all interact to make it difficult for women to leave violent men. In economic
terms it is difficult for a woman to support herself and her children, but more urgent
is the problem of finding housing (Walklate, 2004). Indeed, Jan Pahl found that the
women she interviewed were frequently surprised to discover that they were financially
better off on supplementary benefit than they had been when living with their husbands
(Pahl, 1985). Housing was a major problem; in the past the women had left home
but had been forced back because of their inability to find suitable accommodation.
The refuge provided a warm and friendly environment that battered wives could turn
to, but it was not suitable for the long term.
In social terms wives who have been assaulted often feel that they cannot admit
that their marriage has failed. They blame themselves and see it as an individual
problem. Also, a woman’s relatives and friends may well tell her that she has herself
to blame for being in the situation and that she must put up with it (Homer et al.,
1984).
Mama (1989) and Maguire (1988) have pointed to the additional problems of
Black women leaving violent partners. Mama, for example, documents incidents where
the collective pressures of the extended family make it difficult to leave, and Maguire
points to the problems that women who have come to Britain to marry confront – of
deportation, of stigma and of their family’s response if they have to return to their own
countries.
Patriarchal and familial ideology also influence the response of welfare agencies
to wives who have been assaulted. Johnson (1985) argues that social workers have
often not been trained to deal with assaults on wives, that they lack the resources
to help women victims and at best they can refer women to a hostel. A large propor-
tion of assaulted women seek medical help – for example, 80 per cent of the Dobash
and Dobash (1980) sample had been to the doctor, and 64 per cent of the women Jan
Pahl (1985) interviewed – although they rarely mentioned that they were beaten
by their husbands. Doctors do not see marital problems as part of their concern; this
is not the kind of problem that ‘real’ medicine is concerned with (see Chapter 7). In a
number of studies women have been critical of the response of doctors to their attempt
to seek help, and especially of the medical practice of prescribing tranquillisers (Dobash
and Dobash, 1980; Pahl, 1985). Non-medical advice, when it was offered, was generally
to leave the man, but no account was taken of practical problems. The police were also
frequently criticised in these studies and by the women who had been assaulted. Police,
it is argued, are reluctant to intervene in what they regard as domestic disputes and
will rarely take the men to court (Dobash and Dobash, 1980; Edwards, 1989; Bourlet,
1990). This is a problem because women frequently turn to the police for help, and
while (as we noted above) the police response is improving, this is probably happening
only slowly and patchily in Britain (Johnson, 1995).

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In the 1970s the one major response of the government to the problem of assaults
on wives was a set of legal reforms designed to give women greater protection from
violent men and to make it easier for women to leave them. An analysis of how the legal
reforms have worked in practice demonstrates, feminists argue, both the limitations of
reform and the ways in which patriarchal ideology influences judicial decisions.
Three Acts were passed in the late 1970s, all designed to assist women assaulted
by their husbands: the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act 1976, the
Domestic Proceedings and Magistrates’ Courts Act 1978 and the Housing (Homeless
Persons) Act 1977. The 1977 Housing Act made it the responsibility of local authorities
to rehouse certain categories of people – mainly families – providing they had not
intentionally made themselves homeless. The Act explicitly stated that women who
had left a violent man should not be seen as having intentionally made themselves
homeless and should be rehoused if they had dependent children. However, many
local authorities have not rehoused women and their children. Furthermore, even if
they are prepared to accept the woman as homeless the problem is not solved. The
woman and her children will have to live in accommodation designated for homeless
persons for some time and then to accept the first offer of permanent accommodation,
however unsatisfactory the woman may find it. Also, while she is in temporary accom-
modation the husband may be able to gain custody of the children; still living in
the matrimonial home, he may be able to convince the court that he can better provide
for his children than can his wife. If the wife no longer has custody of the children, she
is no longer entitled to be rehoused by the local authority.
The Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act (DVMPA) and
the Domestic Proceedings and Magistrates Act (DPMA) were both designed to give
battered women greater protection. The DVMPA applied in the County Courts and
permitted courts to issue non-molestation and exclusion injunctions independently
of any other proceedings before the court. Injunctions were to be available in an
emergency, could have powers of arrest attached, and men could be sent to prison for
breach of an injunction. Relief was available to married and cohabiting women equally.
The DPMA extends similar powers to Magistrates’ Courts. This meant that women
had a local, inexpensive, simple and quick access to relief if they were assaulted.
However, the provisions applied only to married women, magistrates had no powers
to exclude men from certain localities, and husbands could be arrested only if they
inflicted actual physical injury on their wives.
In practice these Acts have not extended much greater protection to wives. Case
law has established legal precedents which demonstrate judges’ and magistrates’
reluctance to prevent a man entering his property. It has been made evident that the
courts see the protection of children as the most important factor. There has been a
reluctance to use the emergency powers, and injunctions are frequently issued without
powers of arrest attached, which means the police argue that they cannot enforce the
injunction. Over and above this, the police have been reluctant to intervene even when
powers of arrest have been attached.
We can conclude, then, that the current state of English law on domestic violence
is one of a legal system which provides all the necessary remedies, but which in its
operation fails to protect women as fully as it should and leaves them vulnerable. What
we must bear in mind however is that abused women are not just victims but also

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survivors – Hoff (1990) describes them in her study as ‘crisis managers rather than
helpless victims’ (p. 56), and Dobash and Dobash (1992) reject the view that abused
women become the victims of learned helplessness.

Women, violence and male power

Some feminists have argued that by concentrating on rape and assaults on wives the
real extent of male violence against women is obscured. They argue that all women
are affected by male violence and that the crime statistics and official victim and self-
report studies seriously underestimate the extent of violence towards women by men.
Violence is a powerful mechanism of social control; women’s movements are severely
restricted by the actual violence they experience and by fear of male violence.
Violence, it is argued, encompasses more than actual physical assault and includes all
behaviour designed to control and intimidate women carried out by men. The extent
to which men control and intimidate women only becomes evident when we include
sexual harassment, obscene telephone calls, flashing and other behaviour by men
designed to control women. Liz Kelly has offered the following definition of sexual
violence:

[Sexual violence] includes any physical, visual, verbal or sexual act that is experi-
enced by the woman or girl, at the time or later, as a threat, menace or assault,
that has the effect of hurting her or degrading her and/or takes away her ability
to control intimate contact.
(Kelly, 1988, p. 4)

Research by Jalna Hanmer and Susan Saunders (1984) and by Jill Radford (1987)
has found that women’s behaviour is very much restricted by their fear of men – both
in the domestic sphere and in the public. Women do not go out at night, or to certain
places, not only because they fear attack, but also because the men with whom they
live try to prevent them going out alone. They also found that women experience
considerable amounts of violent behaviour from men, but that much of this is hidden
– it is not reported to the police, nor do women reveal their experience of violence in
response to surveys such as the British Crime Survey. They suggest that this is because
women are reluctant to reveal the extent to which men are violent and there is no
reason to suppose that the women who have not reported the violence to the police
are more likely to reveal it to a survey. In their research they acknowledged the reasons
why they were doing the research in advance and left the women to define violence
themselves. They argue, therefore, that their findings reflect more accurately the
experiences of the women and their perceptions of violence.
Jacqui Halson (1989) argues that her research among 14-year-old girls in a
co-educational school confirms that sexual harassment is a form of sexual violence
commonly experienced by young women both in school and outside. The young
women experienced sexual harassment from both male teachers and male pupils, and
she argues that the school sanctioned it by not intervening and therefore reproduced
the existing imbalances of power between women and men. The girls felt uncomfortable

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and threatened by the behaviour of one male teacher, who was referred to as ‘a right
Casanova’. The boys leered at the girls, verbally harassed them and physically
assaulted them, although the behaviour usually stopped short of rape. Often one girl
was sexually harassed by a gang of boys, and this increased a sense of powerlessness
and meant that the girls policed their own behaviour so that they were not likely to meet
a group of boys when on their own. The girls did not find the boys’ behaviour flattering,
but offensive and humiliating, and in no way could it be said to be experienced as
‘friendly’, ‘inoffensive’ or ‘just teasing’. Nor was it mutual, and it could not be dismissed
as banter or mutual flattery. The girls were not empowered to challenge the boys
because the school’s attitude was that such behaviour was harmless, not a serious
problem, and there were no school rules forbidding it.
Halson suggests that one incident reveals the lack of understanding by the school
authorities of how seriously the girls viewed sexual harassment. Some graffiti was put
up in the school – ‘Mary is a slag’. The young woman concerned was extremely upset,
and her mother came to the school and threatened to take action. However, a senior
member of the staff suggested that the mother was making a lot of fuss over nothing
and that ‘slag’ was a common term of abuse used to refer to girls – precisely missing
the key point, that terms like ‘slag’ are used to diminish women, to humiliate them and
to enable men to control them.
Carol Ramazanoglu (1987) has pointed out how difficult it is for female academics
to challenge sexual harassment from male colleagues, and in other situations women
do not have the physical strength to fight men. Other researchers have argued that the
response of women to other forms of violence is eminently rational when seen from
their perspective. Women who are raped or flashed at say that they are scared of being
killed and this conditions their response. Women do not report incidents of violence
to the police because they are aware of the patriarchal response that they will elicit.
Women who are the victims of male violence are likely to see themselves as blamed
for it. Feminists are aware that neither changes in legislation nor asking men to change
their behaviour are likely to make much difference, although both are important. They
therefore argue that women should organise to help themselves, arguing for more
refuges to be run and controlled by women, for rape crisis centres, and for women to
be taught self-defence techniques.
What is vital also is to challenge the view that assaults on wives and rape are in
some sense different from other violent crimes. They are, of course, in that they are
examples of the ways in which men use violence to maintain or reassert their power
over women and control women, but they are not less serious. Indeed, it could be
argued that they are more serious. What must be challenged is the common-sense view
that crimes in the domestic sphere are a private matter and not the concern of the
police and the criminal justice system, and that rape is a sexual crime, the result of
men’s innate sexual urges.

Conclusions

In this chapter we have dealt with two aspects of feminist work on crime. In the first
half we discussed feminist work on women and crime, and in the second half work

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on male violence towards women. The two halves reflect very different feminist
approaches. The work on women and crime is heavily academic in orientation and
concerned with either incorporating women into existing theories of crime or arguing
for the need to reformulate sociological approaches to crime in order that they can
adequately explain both why women are so non-criminal and the behaviour of the
women who do break the law.
The work on women and violence has to a large extent been carried out by radical
feminists (see Chapter 2 for more details) who are concerned not only with researching
the problem of men’s violence to women but also with developing strategies for dealing
with it. They argue that male violence affects all women, irrespective of age, race or
social class, and that it is one of the major ways in which men control women in patri-
archal societies. We have included such material in this chapter on women and crime
because we want to demonstrate not only the ways in which malestream sociology
has ignored or marginalised the crimes that are committed by men against women;
but also the ways in which the legal system marginalises, trivialises and belies women’s
victimisation, and how it often blames violence on the victim. Men who are attacked
on the street are not told that they should not have been out there; women often are.
Men who are beaten up are not told it was because of the way they behaved; women
often are. Men are not advised not to go out at night alone or not to visit certain places;
women often are. Men control women’s behaviour and this control is reinforced not
only by the media, the police and the courts but also by other women. Control of
women is a key aspect of understanding women’s behaviour – why women break the
law and why they do not, and why they are attacked, beaten and abused by men.

SUMMARY

1 Feminists have highlighted aspects of crime hitherto ignored or

considered ‘normal’ – for example, rape, assault on wives and sexual
harassment.
2 Feminists have argued that these need to be explained in the context
of male power and the fact that violence is considered ‘normal’
behaviour for men in our society but not for women.

FURTHER READING

Heidensohn, F. (2000) Sexual Politics and Social Control. Buckingham: Open University Press. This
is an interesting and accessible book that focuses on the relationship between gender and social
control, taking account of issues such as globalisation and the gendered politics of risk, and how
these issues shape men’s and women’s behaviour.
Lees, S. (1997) Ruling Passions: Sexual Violence, Reputation and the Law. Buckingham: Open
University Press. This interesting and thought-provoking book explores the disciplinary
processes that constrict women’s lives with particular reference to sexuality. It places particular
emphasis on the ways in which gendered and sexualised discourses mean that women subject

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themselves and each other to self-surveillance. It also explores some of the ways in which
institutional and social practices relating to criminal justice are gendered.
Naffine, N. (1996) Feminism and Criminology. Cambridge: Polity. This engaging and accessible
book reviews feminist criticisms and contributions to criminology from a range of perspectives.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Politics

Women are notably absent from what is conventionally seen as ‘politics’ in most
societies including Britain. When the Labour Government was elected in 1997, much
was made of ‘Blair’s babes’ – the newly elected female Labour MPs. However, British
politics remains dominated by men at national level. Most Cabinet Ministers are male,
and most MPs are male. Despite the fact that the former Conservative Party leader,
Mrs Thatcher, was Prime Minister from 1979 to 1991, there are and have been few
other women in key positions of political power in Britain, few women trade union
leaders and few Members of Parliament (though the number of women local govern-
ment councillors has increased). Women are assumed to be less able at carrying out
political tasks than men and less interested in politics. Interestingly, the collapse of
communism in the former USSR has resulted in a reduction in the number of women
engaged in positions of political power as social institutions have begun to resemble
those of the West more closely. In some countries such as Rwanda, meanwhile, 50 per
cent female membership of Parliament has been achieved – through a quota system
designed to ensure this.
Political sociology has tended in the past to accept this common-sense view of
women’s relationship to politics and to give it ‘scientific’ authority. In malestream
political sociology, women have tended to be seen as irrelevant to politics or, when
mentioned, have been seen as behaving in less authentically political ways than
men. Feminist criticisms have been raised of the ways in which women have been
distorted in political sociology and especially in voting studies, and there have
been feminist studies of women’s political activity, as well as analyses of gendered
politics, examining not only women’s political activity but also patriarchal resistance
– that is, the power struggle between feminism and patriarchy. Analysis has also been
undertaken of the role of the state in creating and maintaining the nuclear family and
the role of women as wives and mothers. In this chapter we shall examine feminist
criticisms of malestream political sociology and feminist research on women’s politics,
considering each of these various issues.

Men, women and voting studies

Malestream research has suggested that women’s participation in politics is less than
men’s and that women’s concerns and demands are a reflection of moral or familial
commitments rather than an authentic political stance. For example, men are said to

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be concerned about pay and hours of work while women are more concerned with
working conditions. However, this literature has exaggerated the differences between
men and women in political behaviour, and while suggesting that women’s political
behaviour is influenced by the private sphere it has discounted the influence of the
private sphere on the political behaviour of men. In terms of voting behaviour, male-
stream researchers have claimed that women vote less than men, that women are
naturally more conservative than men, that women are more fickle than men, and
that women are more influenced by personalities. However, a re-examination of the
literature and research findings by feminists suggests that the evidence on which these
conclusions are based is very flimsy indeed.
Susan Bourque and Jean Grosshaltz (1974) have argued that malestream
researchers have often interpreted data and made assumptions that ‘fit in’ with their
preconceived ideas of women’s political behaviour. First, Bourque and Grosshaltz
point to the ‘fudging of the footnotes’ which enables statements to be made about
women’s political orientations which are either unsupported by the references or
misleading simplifications of the original. Second, they argue there is a tendency to
assume that men (especially husbands) influence women’s political opinions and
behaviour, but not vice versa – especially in terms of voting. Third, there is the un-
questioned assumption that the political attitudes, preferences and style of participation
characteristic of men define mature political behaviour. Women’s behaviour is seen
as immature by definition, if it differs from this. Fourth, it is assumed that women’s
political concerns are located in their role as mothers, and this results in a constrained
view of women’s political potential. Similarly, references to the fact that women are
more conservative than men are often supported by data which in fact show at most
very small differences.
We can mount a similar challenge to the view that women’s political participation
demonstrates that they are less politically aware than men, or less interested. The
evidence indicates the degree to which political parties, trade unions and the norms
of political participation often do not resonate with the concerns, needs and oppor-
tunities of many women. The timing of trade union and political party meetings often
makes it difficult for women with domestic commitments to attend and participate.
Men often argue that issues of central concern to women are less important or some-
how ‘less political’ than the issues which concern men. Indeed, some issues of critical
concern to women are seen as tied in with their natural role and not something that
should be on the political agenda at all. Political matters which have been interpreted
in this light include workplace issues such as paid maternity leave, demands for the
provision of workplace nurseries, school holiday play-schemes and paid time off from
work to care for sick children. At a national level, ‘the endowment of motherhood’
– the idea that women should be paid to bring up children on behalf of the nation – has
been viewed similarly, and it took a ruling by the European Commission for married
women caring for a sick or disabled husband to be allowed to claim a carer’s allowance
(an allowance paid to someone who cares for a severely incapacitated adult or child).
Women have had to fight to get issues such as abortion rights, contraception, equal
pay, and so on to be seen as important political issues. Given this, plus the fact that so
few women are candidates in national or union elections, it is perhaps not surprising
that women’s political participation is not identical to men’s.

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However, careful research has suggested that gender differences are not a major
factor in voting behaviour and that other issues such as social class and age are more
important predictors. For example, it has been suggested that women are less likely
to cast their vote than men, and this has been used to argue that women are less
interested in politics. However, older people are less likely, statistically, to vote than
younger people, and there are more old women than old men; when allowance is
made for age, the apparent difference virtually disappears. It is often argued that
women are influenced in how they vote by the preferences of their husbands (see
e.g. Lazarsfeld et al., 1968). However, the best conclusion from the evidence is that the
influence is mutual (Weiner, 1978; Prandy, 1986).
Political scientists have not in general been much concerned with women’s
political behaviour, and it has generally been assumed that women are less interested
in political issues because their main interest lies in the domestic sphere. However, this
division between a public and a private or domestic sphere is itself a political issue, and
to say that a concern with working conditions, the education of children, the availability
of abortion, and so on is the mark of a moral rather than a political concern is to make
a definite and in many ways contemptuous value judgement. It is indeed possible –
likely, even – that women’s experiences differ from men’s and therefore determine
their voting behaviour differently. Women may well be more affected than men by
cuts in public expenditure in education, health and the implementation of community
care, or at least more aware of the results of such policies. As Dorothy Smith (1979)
argued, women’s lives are cast by their circumstances less in the ‘abstract mode’
of conceptual argument and more in the concrete reality in which such arguments
are grounded; men may have theories on education or health care, but it is the women
who take the children to school and to the doctor. Issues such as working hours,
the provision of nurseries, antenatal care, and the like may therefore loom larger for
women than for men. They are political issues, however, and to ignore them or relegate
them to the domestic sphere is to ignore the basis on which many women make
their political choices. Finally, one may argue that if women were less interested in
public politics than men – a proposition for which the empirical evidence is not strong
– it would be because they felt, realistically, that they had little chance of influencing
events because the political agenda and the processes of politics are dominated
by men.
Thus some feminists have concluded that malestream assumptions about gender
differences in political sociology are inappropriate. Such assumptions have a number
of consequences:

1 By emphasising the characteristics that are seen as ‘male’ or ‘female’, studies treat
men and women as if they were homogeneous social groups, and the variations
amongst men and amongst women are played down. Thus, for example, the ‘job
model’ – the view that a man’s political attitudes and behaviour are determined
by work experiences – is applied to men, and a ‘gender model’ to women.
2 Roles in the domestic sphere are seen as shaping women’s and only women’s voting
behaviour. It is suggested that women vote for candidates because of their personal
qualities, though it has not been suggested that men voted for Mrs Thatcher because
of her charms or wifely qualities.

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3 The assumption that political parties, trade unions, etc. are gender-fair, and that
women’s lack of active participation is due to their lack of interest, ignores the male
domination and control of such organisations. Indeed, the difference in trade union
membership between men and women has narrowed in recent years – mainly as
a result of industrial restructuring and the concentration of women in unionised
occupations such as teaching, nursing and social work (CSO, 1995).

Feminists have not been concerned, however, to argue that women’s political
action is identical to men’s. They have argued that malestream research and male-
dominated trade unions and political parties have a taken-for-granted definition of
what is to count as political. However, this definition excludes much of women’s
expertise and political concerns. Feminists offer an alternative interpretation of
women’s relationship to public life. They demonstrate the extent to which the ‘male
as the norm’ principle operates in political and social analysis – emphasising the way
in which a demarcation between the ‘political’ and the ‘social’ or ‘moral’ is based on
arbitrary but sex-linked criteria. For example, Greenstein (1965) found that girls scored
more highly than boys on measures of ‘citizen duty’ and ‘political efficacy’ but relabel
these attributes as moral rather than political. Feminists suggest that it is necessary to
attribute new meanings to women’s political activities. For example, refraining from
voting may actually be a reflection of the low efficacy of voting. Given that women’s
political concerns are not reflected in politics, the question should be why women
should vote rather than why they should not. Finally, it is argued that what are seen
as women’s skills need to be revalued and seen to be of relevance to political life. It is
suggested that the priorities, skills and issues that women bring with them from the
domestic sphere are valuable additions to politics. Women’s struggle for better working
conditions, for instance, might be an example of this.

Defining feminist politics

Feminists have argued that women do engage in political activities as convention-

ally defined. As we have seen above, women’s voting behaviour is very similar to
men’s. Women do belong to trade unions. There are women who are active members
of trade unions and political parties, women local councillors, women Members of
Parliament, women general secretaries of trade unions, and so on. Women are active
in politics, even if the number of women so engaged is much smaller than the number
of men. Feminists have also suggested that women are often alienated from politics
and excluded by the control and domination of organisations by men. However,
feminists have also argued that women’s political activities and concerns have been
marginalised and ‘hidden from history’. What is seen as political needs to be redefined
feminists have argued. Thus they have maintained that feminism is itself political and
is concerned with the struggle for women’s liberation and emancipation. Feminists,
for example, have had to rediscover the political activities of first wave feminists, a
movement often portrayed as just a group of middle-class women fighting for the vote.
The other activities they engaged in and the writings of nineteenth-century feminists
are often ignored or reinterpreted as concerned with moral/personal issues. However,

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the major argument of feminists has been that ‘the personal is the political’ – that is,
that politics is concerned with the dynamics of power relationships in society and
must therefore be concerned with the power relationships between men and women.
Thus in the public sphere the power that men exercise over women is often ignored
while their domination in the domestic sphere is even less often considered.
Kate Millett (1977), in Sexual Politics, defines politics as ‘power-structured
relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another’
(p. 23). The feminist definition of politics puts on the agenda not only power rela-
tionships between men and women at the personal level, but also the importance of
patriarchal ideology in controlling women’s lives. Thus the orthodox idea, for example,
that women have a free choice in deciding whether to do housework is challenged.
Furthermore, feminists argue that the very division between public and private is a
patriarchal idea used to exclude women and women’s concerns from politics. They
argue that women have been excluded from participation in politics and public life and
that the state has construed the family as private – as an institution outside of state
intervention. In this way, in the name of personal freedom and privacy, one of the
arenas in which women are most exploited and subordinated, in the family, is exempt
from political intervention. The separation between the public and the private has
made possible the legislation of female equality in the former while ignoring the real
differences that exist in the latter. Furthermore, the public/private split makes it
possible to keep women’s values out of the public sphere. Some radical feminists (see
Chapter 2) argue that because of their roles as mothers women have a deeper sense
of humility, caring and community, of belonging and selflessness, than men. Also,
women are prevented from participating on equal terms with men in the public sphere
because of the responsibilities they have or are attributed in the domestic sphere, and
men are often prevented from taking on caring roles in the home.
Feminists have pointed out that this conceptual split between the public and the
private does not even necessarily accord with men’s and women’s lived experiences
of social and political life. Indeed, it has been argued that the state has actually ‘created’
and sustained the family as an institution, and women’s subordination within it.
Legislation on matters such as social security and income maintenance has assumed
that women do and should live with a man on whom they are financially dependent.
On the other hand, matters arising in the public sphere are said to be private: for
example sexual harassment, legislation on contraception and abortion have all been
said to be private/moral issues rather than political ones.

Feminist political activism

The rediscovery of women’s history has been a major achievement of feminist

scholarship in recent years. As part of the reclaiming of ‘herstory’, first wave feminism
as a political movement (in the West at least), has been uncovered. Writing by post-
colonial feminists has also been brought to the fore.
Women, and especially married women, had few rights in the nineteenth century,
and throughout the century women struggled to achieve the same rights as men. Many
of these women were white, middle-class, and so on and sought to have the same

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rights to education, to voting, to work, etc. as middle-class men, but few were con-
cerned about the plight of working-class women or of Black women, or women in
other parts of the world, who were often forced to work long hours and had even fewer
rights than their middle-class sisters. Nevertheless, working-class and Black women
were politically active, especially towards the end of the century, when women founded
their own trade unions and participated in the suffrage movement.
The situation of Caroline Norton provides a graphic illustration of the lack of rights
which married women experienced. She was married to a man who assaulted her
physically and lived off her earnings as a writer. When she eventually decided she
could take no more and left him, she found she had no right of access to her own
children, no right to control her own property, including even her jewellery and
clothing, and no right to her own earnings. It would have been impossible for her to
remain separated from her husband if she had not had relatives who were prepared
to keep her. In the nineteenth century women were a legally inferior class; they were
not regarded as persons under the law. Women in the UK did not gain the right to
custody of infant children until 1839, nor to control their own property until 1882, nor
to vote on the same basis as men until 1928, nor to get a divorce on the same grounds
as men until 1934.
Juliet Mitchell (1986) traces the origins of the feminist movement to the concept
of equality and equal rights that was first introduced during the English Revolution
in the seventeenth century and was further developed in the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The first expressions of feminism were
based on the concept of equality – that men and women should be treated equally. This
was demanded by women who saw themselves as a social group completely excluded
from the tenets and principles of the ‘new’ society that had developed after the English
Revolution. Eighteenth-century feminists were middle-class women who argued their
case in relation to the economic changes that were taking place. The emerging
bourgeois class was seeking freedom and equality in society, and the feminists argued
that these new freedoms and equalities should be extended to middle-class women as
well as men. Writing on marriage in 1700, Mary Astell asked:

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves? As they must be
if their being subjected to the inconsistent, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of
men be the perfect condition of slavery.
(quoted in Mitchell, 1986, p. 71)

Eighteenth-century feminists rejected the view that women were naturally different
from men. They argued against the social power of men and the ways in which men
used that power to exclude women and prevent their being equal.
Arguably the main influence on first wave feminism, however, was Mary
Wollstonecraft, who published A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. She main-
tained that inequalities between men and women were not the outcome of natural
(biological) differences but due to the influence of the environment, and especially
the fact that women were excluded from education. She argued that both women and
society in general were damaged by conditioning women into an inferior social status.
What was necessary was both to educate women and to change society so that men

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and women were seen and treated as equal. Another major influence on the first wave
feminist movement was The Subjection of Women, published in 1869 by John Stuart Mill
and Harriet Taylor Mill. This was written at the height of the Victorian repression of
women and put forward a coherent equal-rights argument – that men and women
should have the same rights under the law.
Nineteenth-century feminism was mainly concerned with women having the same
legal rights as men. The campaigns that were fought on issues connected with sexuality
and sexual politics have been ignored or seen as right-wing because the women
concerned were opposed to sexual liberation (Jeffreys, 1985). However, they argued
that sexual liberation was for men and that it exploited women. They argued, for
example, to raise the age of sexual consent from 13 to 16 for girls, which happened
in 1885. Another issue that feminists campaigned around was the repeal of the
Contagious Diseases Acts which were introduced in the 1860s in an attempt to reduce
the spread of venereal diseases among men in the armed forces. The Acts, which
applied to a number of garrison towns, enabled the police to stop any women they
suspected of being a common prostitute and have her examined for venereal disease.
If the woman was found to have a venereal disease she was taken to a ‘lock hospital’
for compulsory treatment (Walkowitz, 1980).
During the nineteenth century it was believed that women had no interest in sex
themselves and that sexual relations were purely for men’s pleasure. Male homo-
sexuality was against the law, but there was no law against lesbianism because it was
not thought to exist. Women were seen as a moral force in the home and in society
precisely because they were resistant to the pleasures of the body, such as sexual
relations, drinking, and so on. The view of the early feminists was therefore to protect
women from being exploited for men’s pleasure.

They were particularly outraged at the way in which the exercise of male sexuality
created a division of women into ‘the pure’ and ‘the fallen’ and prevented the
unity of a ‘sisterhood of women’. They insisted that men were responsible for
prostitution and that the way to end such abuse of women was to curb the demand
for prostitutes by enforcing chastity upon men rather than by punishing those who
provided the supply. They employed the same arguments in their fight against
other aspects of male sexual behaviour which they regarded as damaging to
women, such as sexual abuse of children, incest, rape and sexual harassment in
the street.
(Jeffreys, 1985, p. 8)

They successfully campaigned against incest, legislation being passed in 1908, but
were less successful in their attempt to get the law on ‘rape in marriage’ changed – the
right of men to have sex with their wives was embodied in English common law.
However, the Matrimonial Causes Act 1884 ended the power of husbands to imprison
a wife who refused conjugal rights, and legal decisions in the late twentieth century
made rape in marriage a criminal offence under common law (see Chapter 10).
In other words, some feminists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
argued that men were able to exploit and abuse women sexually and that this was an
abuse of power by adult men. Feminists in the late twentieth century, and especially

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radical feminists, made very similar points and campaigned about the ways men use
sexuality as a tool for controlling and subordinating women. In taking on these issues
the early feminists exposed themselves to both ridicule and detestation. Sexuality was
a ‘taboo’ subject and the feminists who campaigned around issues to do with sexuality
destroyed their reputations by making public issues which were not discussed
(Walkowitz, 1980).
While women did not achieve equality with men in the nineteenth century, or
even the early twentieth century, most of the rights have been won in the UK with
the passage of the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay legislation implemented in the
1970s. However, contemporary feminists have argued that the provision of formally
equal rights is insufficient; while women are subordinated by the gender order and
subject to patriarchal power and ideology, they cannot be equal (either to men, or to
each other – Irigaray, 1993).
The second wave feminist movement has been concerned to make women aware
of the shared female condition that controls and constrains all women regardless of
individual circumstances. A major element of the movement has been consciousness-
raising – women meeting together in small groups to share their common experiences
as women. The movement has rejected conventional political organisation and has
sought to establish itself as a movement with no leaders, no spokespersons or privi-
leged analysis – a key concept particularly in the 1970s has been ‘sisterhood’. While
the movement has been accused of being comprised predominantly of middle-class,
young, educated, white women, it has nevertheless campaigned successfully and
worked on a number of important issues, notably in relation to sexuality. The Women’s
Movement was primarily responsible for bringing to light the large number of women
who are physically assaulted by their husbands, and the inadequacies of state services
for these women. Women’s groups have established hostels for abused women and
their children around the country. Rape has been another issue about which women
have campaigned. Not only has there been pressure for changes in attitudes and in the
law, but also research that suggests that most women who are raped do not go to the
police. Women’s groups have also established confidential rape crisis lines to help
women who have been raped or sexually abused. The Women’s Movement has
campaigned actively against sexual harassment in the workplace and raised awareness
in trade unions and political organisations about the problems that women experience
in relation to men. Women have also campaigned actively around contraception issues
and abortion. Initially the Movement argued for free access to abortion on demand,
but more recently it has argued for the woman’s right to choose whether or not to
have an abortion. The change came about as middle-class white women were made
aware that some others, especially Black and working-class women, were pressured
into having abortions. Also feminists are concerned that the choice should be made a
realistic one – that is, women who choose to have the baby should have the financial
and other necessary support to be able to provide for it adequately. Initially the fight
was for abortion law reform, but more recently the fight has been to prevent the law
being reformed so that women’s access to abortions becomes very limited.
Globally, women have fought against female circumcision and arranged marriage
and for legislation to intervene in the case of dowry deaths and child marriage. Women
have been politically active in a range of ways, fighting for women’s rights and chal-

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lenging laws and institutions that keep women in a subordinate role. Women have
also been central to political campaigns and activities (at Greenham Common in the
UK for instance – see Roseneil, 1995), have organised and taken part in political
demonstrations and have been involved in a range of movements such as campaigns
for animal rights and environmental politics. Women have also played a major role in
the disability movement, and have highlighted the important areas of overlap between
feminism and disability politics – in challenging patriarchal perspectives on the body,
for instance (Hughes, 2000). Contemporary feminism has recognised that legislation
is necessary but not sufficient for women’s emancipation and that (despite the claims
of post-feminists – see Chapter 2) feminism is an ongoing political struggle. The law
has limited power to change attitudes and to transform an essentially masculine social
order (particularly in societies, such as in Southeast Asia or parts of India and
Africa, in which an ‘equal rights’ discourse is entirely alien to the masculine cultural
hegemony). As we saw in Chapter 2, feminists differ in their aims and primary concerns
(sexual difference, class, race, disability, age, global power relations, and so on), but
all feminists want to emancipate women.

Women and the state

Some feminists have argued that the state has played an important role in constructing
and maintaining the bourgeois nuclear family and the ideologies that suggest that
this type of family is normal and natural (e.g. Abbott and Wallace, 1992). They identify
the ‘welfare’ aspect of the state as particularly instrumental in this respect. Here we
are using ‘the state’ to refer to the government and all the other institutions involved
in regulating society: the civil service, local government, the courts, the police, and so
on. The state is not just a set of institutions, but rather institutions that all exercise
power and control in society and have the backing of physical force if necessary. In
theory the power of the state is limitless, but in practice it is limited by ideas of non-
intervention in civil society and in the domestic sphere. What we and many other
feminists would argue is that the state does in fact play an important role in constructing
and maintaining the private/domestic sphere and consequently is central to the
continuing subordination and exploitation of women. It is important to remember
that women’s role in the domestic sphere limits the role they can and are assumed
to be able to play in the public sphere. As we suggested in Chapter 9, feminists have
demonstrated the ways in which jobs are ‘created’ for married women and that
women’s employment opportunities are limited by assumptions about their roles as
wives and mothers. The UK welfare state was built on a ‘male breadwinner’ model –
the assumption that men engaged in paid employment; married women, it was
assumed, provided care in the domestic sphere and were mainly or wholly dependent
on their husbands.

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Women, family and caring

In Chapters 6 and 9 we saw that feminists have shown how an alliance between the
male craft trade unions and the state resulted in the acceptance of the idea that a man
should earn ‘a family wage’ – a wage sufficient to maintain a non-employed wife and
children. This ideology was reinforced by protective legislation that limited the hours
and types of work that women and children would be employed to do. This effectively
resulted in wives becoming excluded from paid employment and the acceptance of
the idea that women should care for their husbands and children in the domestic
sphere. Similarly, compulsory schooling assumes that a parent (the mother) is available
to take and collect children: school hours are not compatible with full-time employment
for both parents. Similarly again, the lack of state provision of adequate nurseries,
holiday childcare provision, and the like makes it difficult for mothers to take on
employment.
However, it is the interaction of ideologies about motherhood and the role of
women, reinforced by state policies, that confines women to their domestic sphere
or at least makes it difficult for women, and especially married women, to participate
with men in the labour market and in political organisations. This is why legislation for
equal opportunities has failed to result in women actually being able to compete on
equal terms with men in the public sphere and why it has been equally difficult for
men to take on responsibilities in the domestic sphere. The general assumption is that
it is women’s responsibility to care for their husbands and children, and men’s to
provide economic support for the family. Welfare state policies have been developed
on the assumption that this is how people do and should live.
Ideologies of the role of women as mothers, especially working-class women,
developed in the UK in the late nineteenth century. The debates surrounding concern
about the health of the working class at the time of the Boer War were used to reinforce
the idea that women with children should not work but should care for them full-time
in the home, that women (but not men) should be taught domestic skills, and that state
intervention in the family was legitimate to ensure that mothers were adequately
performing their role (see Sapsford, 1993, for a discussion of the later intrusion of
psychologists into the control of mothers.)
Welfare provision exercises control over its recipients, and is underpinned by
ideologies emphasising that a particular family form is not just how people do live but
how they should live – thus privileging one way of life and disadvantaging alternative
patterns of social organisation. The welfare state legislation introduced in the UK in
the 1940s clearly and explicitly made these assumptions in terms of providing, for
example, for income maintenance during unemployment, sickness and old age with
the assumption that women would be dependent on men and therefore did not need
to pay full contributions in order to be entitled to these benefits.
In the 1970s and 1980s, partly as a result of pressure from the European Court
of Human Rights, there were some changes in welfare and taxation policies that
removed some aspects of discrimination. More recently, European legislation has
forced the UK Government to introduce family-friendly policies, such as the right to
ask for flexible working hours when caring for young children and the availability
of paternity leave. Most women, including married women, now pay full National

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Insurance contributions when in employment and can have contributions credited for
periods when they are caring for dependent children or relatives. Married women
are now entitled to claim the care allowance and are taxed separately from their hus-
bands. However, few social policy measures have been implemented that would
make it easier for married women to take paid employment – although the policies of
the Labour Government are to support dual-earner families through the National
Children Strategy announced in 1998. However, the reality for many women is that
they are now expected to take on the double burden of domestic and paid labour and
often the triple burden of providing care for elderly or dependent relatives as well (see
Chapters 6 and 7).
The ideological proposition that a woman’s place is in the home caring for her
children and husband continues to be a widely accepted and unquestioned one. Indeed,
in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe there was a resurgence of familial
ideology following the collapse of communism in 1991, when the view began to
emerge again that women should not be in paid employment and should not engage
in political activity. Interestingly, even under communism, with all its stress on equality
of the right to work, women were seen as responsible for the domestic sphere and
expected to care for their husband, children and other dependent relatives. The state
did provide support, however, especially in the provision of nurseries – and these have
now virtually disappeared.
The Thatcher government in Britain attempted in speeches and publications to
reinforce the familial ideology that assumes the economic dependency of married
women in the family. Policies such as community care (further emphasised in the 1990
National Health Service and Community Care Act) which assume that women are
ready, able and willing to care for dependent and elderly relatives are an important
aspect of this, assuming as they do that women are available to take on this burden
and are naturally able to provide care. The government were concerned to argue that
negligent mothers and mothers who work are a major cause of many contemporary
social problems. The Labour Government from 1997 has moved the debate forward
by introducing measures to support working parents, but the assumption that women
provide care has not been seriously challenged. Women are expected to take on the
double shift and in some cases this becomes a triple shift.

Women and poverty

State welfare policies and familial ideology also mean that women are more likely to
be in poverty than men. An analysis of the groups most likely to be in poverty in
contemporary Britain and of income distribution within households enables us to see
that women are much more likely to be poor than men. Analysis by household also
conceals the ways in which women’s low-paid employment can keep households
out of poverty or mitigate against the full impact of poverty being felt by other members
of a household. The assumption that most women can depend on a man’s wages to
keep them out of poverty conceals the low pay among women workers and the low
resources over which women have command, because some women are seen as
financially dependent. Indeed, official statistics now talk about ‘households on low

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incomes’. The gender pay gap remains at about 19 per cent and has changed little in
the thirty years since the implementation of the Equal Pay Act (see Chapter 9).
The main groups in poverty in contemporary Britain are:

• those on low wages,

• the unemployed,
• the long-term sick or disabled,
• single parents, and
• those over retirement age.

However, none of these factors is a cause of poverty in itself. Most of these groups
are dependent on state benefits; poverty ensues because state benefits are too low to
lift the recipients above the poverty threshold. Governments have been explicit that
benefits are designed as income maintenance, to provide a basic subsistence level.
Women are over-represented in all of the groups listed above. There are in addition
two further reasons why women are likely to be in poverty:

• as unpaid carers of sick, disabled or elderly relatives, or

• as dependants of a male wage earner – either because that wage is at the poverty
level or because the man does not share his resources equitably within the
household.

Caroline Glendinning and Jane Millar (1992) found that two household types are the
most likely to be poor (i.e. living on 140 per cent or less of the supplementary benefit
level) – elderly women living alone (of whom 60 per cent were in poverty) and lone
mothers (of whom 61 per cent were in poverty). Together the two types account for
32 per cent of households in poverty but constitute only 15 per cent of all households.
Feminists have argued that women’s poverty has to be seen in the context of
women’s marginal position in the labour market and the assumed dependency
of women on men for financial support. This latter assumption is employed both in the
income support system (despite minor changes in recent years) and in the ideology of
the ‘family wage’. The assumption is not only that there is a sexual division of labour
such that men are the economic providers and women the carers, but the ideology
also carries over and influences the economic position of women who do not live with
a man, whether because single, divorced or widowed. Women’s position in the labour
market means that they are less likely than men to earn a living wage and are con-
centrated in low-paid jobs (see Chapter 9). It is this assumed dependence of women
on men that has been used, historically, to justify the higher pay of men (the ‘family
wage’) and is reflected in welfare state legislation. The disadvantages that women in
the labour market experience also contribute to the poverty of lone-parent mothers.
Even when a woman bringing up children on her own feels that she can manage to
take on paid employment as well, she may find that there is no economic advantage
in doing so. The kind of low-paid work she is likely to be able to find, coupled with the
expenses of work and childminding fees, mean that most lone mothers will not be
better off than when drawing benefit.
Finally, women are expected to be primarily responsible for children, the elderly
and other dependents, although if they take on these roles they will be in danger of

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falling into poverty. For many married women with children or other caring respon-
sibilities, poverty will be the major problem.
Women’s low pay, interrupted labour-market participation and tendency to take
on part-time employment for a period of time also affects their entitlement to income
maintenance when they are not economically active. Women are assumed to be
dependent on the men with whom they live, whether married or not, and it is assumed
that these men will make provision for income maintenance for themselves and their
wives in old age. This assumption has been reflected in legislation, and while there have
been some changes in social security legislation in recent years this has not markedly
changed the situation. Under social security regulations current in the UK at the time
of writing, a woman whose male friend stays more than three nights per week is
deemed to be supported by him, and her benefit is cut. The case for this is particularly
strong if she also does his washing or cooks him meals. It is clear that in social security
regulations economic support should be provided in return for sexual and domestic
services. While the ‘cohabitation rule’, as it is known, can also be applied to female
visitors of men, in practice this is rare.
Women who are caring for children receive no income maintenance, although
those caring for an adult dependent are entitled to a care allowance. However, this
does not compensate for loss of wages, being paid in any case at a lower rate than
contributory benefits such as unemployment or sick pay. Women who become un-
employed are entitled to unemployment pay only if they have made sufficient
contributions and can fulfil the criteria for registering as unemployed (i.e. they are
available for work). Women may not be entitled to unemployment pay because they
have not been working for long enough or because they were working too few hours
to pay contributions. They may not be able to register because they cannot demon-
strate satisfactorily their availability for full-time work (because they have young
children) or because they will not state that they are prepared to travel anywhere
in the country. Similarly, many married women are not entitled to claim contributory
invalidity benefits, and the ‘housework test’ of the non-contributory benefit is extremely
difficult to satisfy. Income support (the replacement for supplementary benefit) is
paid to a household, and the principle of assessment is household need. Feminists
have also pointed out that household income is often not equally shared and that
women can be in poverty even within a relatively affluent household if benefits and
wages all go to the man (Graham, 1984).
Feminists have therefore concluded that women’s poverty can be understood
only in the context of gender inequalities that persist throughout the life course.
Ideologies of women’s ‘natural’ abilities and ‘natural’ roles structure women’s oppor-
tunities to take on paid work and the type of jobs that are offered to them. The realities
of women’s lives, structured by these ideologies and state policies, also limit their
opportunities to take on employment and the range and types of employment they can
take on. Furthermore, the assumption that men support their wives means that much
female poverty is hidden. Women are expected to manage on the money, to be wise
spenders and to make the money stretch. They are also likely to be the ones to have
to refuse their children the treats, clothes, outings and activities that many children
take for granted and to have continually to disappoint their children. Women also
disproportionately have to suffer the stress, the lack of opportunities for fulfilment and

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the feelings of insecurity that go with being poor. Also, women’s health as well as their
general well-being suffers as a result of being poor, especially if they lack an adequate
diet because they put the needs of other family members before their own.

Conclusions

Thus the idea of the public and private and the exclusion of women from the public
sphere have been created by political processes – government legislation and state
policies. Familial ideologies that place women in the domestic sphere as wives and
mothers are reinforced both by legislation and by the speeches and manifestos of
political parties. In contemporary societies and historically, women have (collectively
and individually) resisted these in a number of ways, however, including the first and
second wave feminist movements (in the West), as well as taking part in a variety of
pressure group campaigns, and modes of political activism and resistance movements.

SUMMARY

1 Women have been stereotyped in conventional accounts of political

behaviour as being uninterested in politics, politically conservative and
influenced by their husbands. All these stereotypes have been shown
not to hold.
2 Conventional politics reflects male concerns and has effectively
excluded women. Hence women are under-represented in public
political life.
3 The welfare state and welfare policies have constructed and reinforced
women’s traditional position as wives and mothers.
4 Feminists have struggled over issues affecting women – specifically
their rights to property and custody of their children in the nineteenth
century, and their rights to abortion, equal pay and nursery provision
in the twentieth century. Furthermore, feminists have redefined the
notion of politics around personal struggle as well as public campaign.

FURTHER READING

Colgan, F. and Ledwith, S. (2003) Negotiating Gender Democracy: New Trade Union Agendas.
London: Palgrave. Issues of gender are at the heart of this study of trade union politics, which
considers themes such as race, ethnicity and representation, leadership, social movement
activities and disability politics – neglected themes in much malestream research on trade
unions.
Nash, K. (1999) Contemporary Political Sociology: Globalization, Politics and Power. Oxford:
Blackwell. This book thoroughly reviews recent work in political sociology, taking account
of feminist criticisms and contributions. It also considers themes such as globalisation, new

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social movements and citizenship, particularly in the light of postmodern debates within
sociology.
Roseneil, S. (1995) Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham. Buckingham:
Open University Press. This book is an engaging account of women’s political activism at
Greenham Common, and of women’s contribution to campaigns for disarmament outside of
malestream political institutions.
Waylen, G. (1996) Gender in Third World Politics. Buckingham: Open University Press. This book
develops a feminist analysis of third world politics, and focuses particularly on the relationship
between gender and development. It examines organised politics and political institutions, as
well as ‘grassroots’ social movements, focusing particularly on women’s organisations.

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 CHAPTER TWELVE

Mass media and popular culture

Culture is a central concept in sociological analysis, providing an important link

between the individual and society. It has been a key concern of feminist sociology.
As Michele Barrett pointed out, ‘cultural politics are crucially important to feminism
because they involve struggles over meaning’ (1982, p. 37). Although the cultures
found in all parts of the world and even within the same societies and social settings
differ in many ways, what sociologists think of as ‘cultures’ seem, as Macionis and
Plummer (2002, pp. 100–107) outline, to be built on five major components. These are:

1 symbols (anything that carries a particular meaning recognised by people who share
the same culture);
2 language (a system of symbols that allows members of a society to communicate
with one another);
3 values (the beliefs that people have about what is good and bad);
4 norms (social rules and expectations which guide behaviour); and
5 material culture (the tangible objects that sociologists term artefacts).

In this chapter we focus on feminist and sociological debates about the role of culture
in shaping gender relations and, particularly, in reproducing gender inequalities. If we
accept, as most feminist sociologists argue, that gender is socially constructed, that
is, a learned and negotiated aspect of our identity, then we need to give consideration
to where gender comes from, to how we acquire it and to why it takes the various forms
that it does. Important, in this respect, is to consider the role of culture and particularly
the mass media as an agent of gender socialisation throughout our lives.
The relationship between gender and media culture has been the subject of
considerable debate for feminists. Feminists continue to be divided for instance over
the extent to which pornographic representations of women are linked to sexual vio-
lence (see Chapter 8). Broadly speaking, feminist perspectives on gender, the mass
media and popular culture can be divided into two distinct approaches. Whilst most
would agree that the media is a powerful source of identity, some feminists have argued
that the media actually dictates gender identity to us allowing women to perform
or identify with only a relatively narrow range of roles. Those feminists who adopt this
approach tend to emphasise what has been termed the ‘symbolic annihilation of
women’ (Tuchman, 1981). Marshment (1993), who adopts this perspective, argues
that representation is a highly political issue and that the apparent ‘naturalness’ of

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media representations of men and women is evidence of the power of patriarchal

ideology. As she puts it,

From primary school reading schemes to Hollywood films, from advertising to

opera, from game shows to art galleries, women are depicted in ways that define
what it means to be a woman in this society: what women are like (naturally),
what they ought to be like, what they are capable of, and incapable of, what roles
they play in society, and how they differ from men.
(Marshment, 1993, p. 124)

In her book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf (1990) has similarly argued that
capitalism, patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality interact to produce a crude
ideology manifest in representations such as the film Pretty Woman, characterised by
the message ‘be pretty, get a man, be complete, escape poverty and misery’. What she
calls the ‘beauty myth’ (drawing on Betty Friedan’s earlier work on the ‘feminine
mystique’ – the idea that women can find self-satisfaction in housework, see Chapter
2) is a media ideology that perpetuates the idea that if women buy enough products
they will be able to conform to patriarchal ideals of beauty and sexual attractiveness.
Wolf goes on to argue that the beauty myth defines women visually in two ways. First,
it defines an ideal ‘look’ for women. Although this varies culturally and historically, it
usually involves – in Western societies at least – being tall, slim and white. So women
are defined or measured against an ideal standard of beauty. Second, the beauty myth
emphasises that femininity itself is an aesthetic phenomena – in other words, to be
feminine is defined largely in terms of looking feminine. This means that both men and
women learn to think of femininity primarily as a visual identity. Wolf argues that this
is evidenced in the enormity of the beauty and cosmetics industries, in women’s
magazines, in film and music videos, in sport and leisure, and also in gender disparities
in eating disorders. She likens the impact of the beauty myth on women’s lives to
the Iron Maiden, a sarcophagus-like medieval instrument of torture that enclosed
women in a spiked interior while the exterior featured beautifully painted women’s
(often smiling) faces. Wolf emphasises that as women have made political and eco-
nomic gains, images of female beauty have become more rigid and have reinforced
patriarchal ideology, disguising it (like the Iron Maiden) as something women enjoy.
Magazines, she argues, now concentrate on ‘beauty work’ rather than housework. As
she puts it,

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more
strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon
us. . . . As women released themselves from the feminine mystique of domesticity,
the beauty myth took over its lost ground, expanding as it wanted to carry on its
work of social control.
(Wolf, 1990, p. 10)

Wolf’s perspective echoes earlier work on media culture by feminists such

as Laura Mulvey (1975), in her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Writing
in the 1970s, the height of the soft-focus close-up, Mulvey proposes that in classic
Hollywood cinema women are constructed as passive objects to be looked at by men

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for voyeuristic pleasure. She argues that the ‘male gaze’ operates in three ways,
involving:

1 the gaze of the camera on the female (often sexualised) body, which is often from
the male point of view;
2 male characters and identities, that gaze upon female bodies in the narrative; and
3 male spectators who gaze at the female bodies on the screen.

However, Mulvey (1981) herself has since expressed some reservations about the
overly deterministic nature of this position, and it has been criticised more generally
for ignoring both how women may subvert or negotiate the male gaze, and how
popular culture offers opportunities for women to gaze (at both men and women) as
well. Moreover, such a deterministic approach has also been criticised for reducing
all power relations to gender, and thus neglecting other aspects of power which affect
patriarchal relations, such as class, race, disability and sexuality, and which other
feminists have sought to integrate into their frameworks of analysis.
Other feminists have adopted a different perspective emphasising instead of the
power of media culture the pleasures women derive from the escapism and iden-
tification it offers. Instead of concurring with Mulvey’s ‘active/looking/masculine’ and
‘passive/looked at/feminine’ formula, such approaches have focused on women as
active readers and consumers of media culture. Yet, much of this work has begun with
the question: ‘Why do out of date myths of femininity still continue to exert a magnetic
pull over us, and why is it easier to criticize those media that target us than to explain
their fascination?’ (Macdonald, 1995, p. 11).
Feminists emphasising the pleasures women derive from various media cultural
forms – magazines and soap operas, for instance – have tended to focus not on the
media as dictating gender identity to us, but instead have highlighted its role in
negotiating a range of available identities. Writers such as Ros Coward, Jackie Stacey
and Angela McRobbie have all emphasised that media culture provides women with
a range of options from which to choose. In particular, their work has emphasised that
we don’t have to accept what the media offers us at face value but rather, can consume
media representations selectively, ironically and cynically. In her book Star Gazing for
instance, Jackie Stacey (1994) emphasises that the mass media is a site of negotiated
meanings, of resistances, and of challenges to patriarchal ideologies. She argues that
the media provides: escapism, identification and opportunities for consumption, which
can be empowering as well as exploitative. In doing so, she rejects the universalism
and textual determinism of much feminist work on mass culture. Her account empha-
sises that images of Hollywood stars can be role models, and that the relationship
between media representations and the lived realities of gender is more complex than
simply the passive reception of stereotypes.
At the heart of the distinction between these two approaches is a debate over the
extent to which many of the media forms in which gender is represented are ways
simply of maintaining patriarchal ideology. This argument seems to write off millions
of women (and men) who take pleasure in reading women’s magazines, or in watching
soap operas, as cultural dupes who collude in their own oppression. Both feminist and
non-feminist women take pleasure in fashion, romance, horoscopes, soap operas,

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cooking programmes, magazines, and so on. An alternative position adopted by

feminists such as Modleski (1982) has argued that we should not condemn these
cultural forms themselves, or the men and women who engage with them (thereby dis-
missing their genuine pleasure), but the conditions that have made them both possible
and necessary (e.g. watching soap operas or reading magazines as an ‘escape’), and
as the only ‘choice’ within a relatively narrow range of leisure options for women (see
Chapter 9). As she puts it, the contradictions in women’s lives are more responsible
for the existence of mass cultural forms that appeal to women than the forms are for
the contradictions (p. 57).
Black feminists such as bell hooks (1992) have been particularly critical of the
ways in which white, ethnocentric media have reproduced racist stereotypes origi-
nating in slavery and in colonial societies. In particular, hooks is critical of white women
media ‘stars’ like Madonna for their ‘appropriation of Black culture as yet another
sign of their radical chic’ (p. 157). She goes on, ‘fascinated yet envious of black style,
Madonna appropriates black culture in ways that mock and undermine, making her
presentation one that upstages’ (p. 161). Black and Asian feminists have also drawn
attention to the narrow ways in which racialised women are represented, even in
feminist art and cultural criticism. A.S. Larkin (1988), for instance, highlights the issue
of ethnocentrism in both verbal and visual forms of culture, and in anthropology (the
scientific study of culture):

In a feminist art project dealing with heroines at the Women’s Building in Los
Angeles, a white woman chose the prehistoric ‘Lucy’ as her heroine. ‘Lucy’ is a
tiny lady three feet tall, sixty pounds light and 3.5 million years old. Lucy is the
oldest, most complete skeleton of any erect-walking human ancestor ever found.
I pose the following questions: Why is it that the remains of a prehistoric Ethiopian
woman are called ‘Lucy’? Did it ever occur to the white world that Lucy is not an
African name? The Ethiopians did not call her Lucy. . . .
The Public Broadcasting System screened a documentary on the discovery
of ‘Lucy’. The audience was introduced to the anthropologists at the site in Africa.
The programme included an animated segment which brought the ancient people
to life. They were not Black people; the artist had whitened them. They did not
look like the Ethiopians at the site; they looked like the white anthropologist.
As a Black woman film-maker I would have featured visuals of contemporary
Ethiopian women as part of the documentary. I would have let Ethiopian men
and women talk about ‘Lucy’. Most importantly, I would not have called her, as
did the documentary, by the name the Western anthropologist, Donald Johnson,
gave her from a pop song out of his culture: ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ by
the Beatles. I would have mentioned this, but I would have called her what her
Ethiopian children call her: ‘Wonderful’.
(Larkin, 1988, pp. 167–168)

Many of these debates over the role and impact of media culture, and over the
contested ways in which culture is constructed and represented, are also shaped by
different definitions of culture. Indeed, the meaning of culture and the way in which it
is used in academic studies has changed considerably over time.

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‘Culture’: a brief history of the concept

As Raymond Williams (1968) noted, culture is one of the most difficult words in the
English language to define. Used to refer to a range of different yet related phenomena,
its meaning has changed considerably over time. In Western societies, in the fifteenth
century, culture was used as a verb to refer to the tending of crops and animals (in
the process of cultivation), as it is still used in agriculture today. It was also used as a
noun to refer to an entity which is natural in origin yet which has been grown
or developed artificially. By the sixteenth century, its use had been expanded to refer
to human life and the term culture tended to be used to describe the highest levels of
civilisation. By the mid-eighteenth century, culture came to be associated with social
class, in so far as what was thought to be ‘cultured’ was associated with the activities
and tastes of a cultivated social elite – those who had an appreciation for great litera-
ture, classical music or fine art, for instance. This is what sociologists now call ‘high
culture’ – the highest expressions of human civilisation and artistic sensibility. As
Macionis and Plummer (2002, p. 109) note, the term ‘high’ culture is a shorthand one
used to refer to ‘cultural patterns that distinguish a society’s elite’. In his work on the
relationship between high culture and the ways in which certain privileged social
groups maintain their ‘distinction’ from others, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
(1984) used the term ‘cultural capital’ to describe not the material wealth (although
the two are of course related), but the power and status accorded to particular social
groups because of their educational credentials, cultural awareness and aesthetic
sensibilities. Hence, cultural capital reproduces class and other distinctions by setting
apart those who are thought to be more ‘cultured’ than others (and who are therefore
able to perpetuate the idea that their tastes and lifestyles are superior).
As Macionis and Plummer (2002, p. 109) also point out, the phrase ‘high culture’
is thought to derive from the more everyday term ‘highbrow’. Influenced by phrenology
(the idea – popular in the nineteenth century – that personality types could be discerned
by the shape of a person’s skull), it originally referred to the view that those with
‘highbrows’ had more refined personalities and tastes than ‘lowbrows’.
In the eighteenth century, the term culture also came to be used to refer to a ‘way
of life’ and the values, attitudes, needs and expectations binding people together as a
community (in the form of national or regional cultures, for instance). This is how
cultural anthropologists and historians such as Williams (1968) tend to define culture,
and is what sociologists refer to as ‘lived’ or ‘popular culture’ (literally, the culture of
the people). This understanding of culture became the central concern of emerging
academic disciplines such as anthropology and sociology.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, culture began to be used to describe
the symbolic expression of such characteristics – the ways in which they came to
be represented in language, printed texts, sound, visual images, and so on. These are
what we now tend to refer to as cultural forms, or material culture. Some of these cul-
tural forms are what we would call cultural artefacts – material manifestations or
signifiers of culture. Many sociologists have argued that because in contemporary
societies these cultural forms are primarily mass-produced and disseminated to wide,
undifferentiated audiences, they are best described as ‘mass culture’. Most of these are
produced, marketed and distributed by global corporations that have been described

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as the ‘culture industries’ (Adorno, 1991) and produce most of what we would call mass
media – cultural forms that are produced and consumed on a mass, undifferentiated
scale. Some sociologists have argued that because most of the cultural forms that
we encounter in our everyday lives are produced or at least strongly influenced by
the mass media, and that because most of our social interactions are so highly
mediated, that the distinction between society and the mass media is increasingly
difficult to discern, Western societies, at least, are best understood as ‘media cultures’.
Douglas Kellner (1995) for instance argues that we live in a media culture to the extent
that the only culture deemed to exist is that produced and disseminated by the mass
media:

A media culture has emerged in which images, sounds and spectacles help
produce the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure time, shaping political views
and social behaviour and providing the materials out of which people forge their
very identities.
(Kellner, 1995, p. 1)

Other sociologists and cultural theorists such as Dominic Strinati (1995) have
similarly argued that the growth of mass culture means that there is less room for any
culture which cannot make money, which cannot be mass produced for a mass market,
like art and folk culture. This view has been refuted by (more optimistic) commentators
such as John Fiske (1989) who, while accepting the argument that the mass media
is increasingly powerful, argues that popular culture does still exist as an expression
of people’s everyday lives and experiences and, as such, holds the potential for
resistance to the massive influence of the media.

The sociology of culture and the emergence of

cultural studies

What we now term ‘cultural studies’ emerged as an academic discipline in Britain

during the 1950s, inspired largely by the literary criticism of F.R. Leavis and the writings
of Matthew Arnold. Both writers believed that high culture (especially in the form of
literature) had a civilising effect on people that was threatened by the rise of mass
culture. Arnold summed up this view when he argued that culture is ‘the best that has
been thought and said’. His perception is of culture as expressing the highest values
of human sensibility. This distinction between high culture and mass culture informed
education in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was deemed that only classic
literature should be taught in schools as a means of improving and civilising working
people and their children.
An alternative way of conceptualising culture could be found in the work of
Richard Hoggart (1957) whose book The Uses of Literacy developed a more radical
perspective on culture. Hoggart argued that while high culture was important and
should be preserved as such, of equal significance were the cultural practices and tradi-
tions of working-class communities. Both types of culture – high culture and popular
or folk culture – he argued, should be protected from the rise of commercially driven,

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mass-produced culture which was merely concerned with maximum profit and not
education or cultural expression.
Hoggart thus made a sociologically important distinction between high culture,
popular culture and mass culture. Following Hoggart, most sociologists define popular
culture as the values and practices that emerge from the everyday lived experiences
of ordinary people. It is not homogenous, but is based on diverse local and regional
traditions, and ways of life. Mass culture, on the other hand, is considered to represent
values and ideas which are imposed on people through various primarily commer-
cial avenues (public sector broadcasting is perhaps the most obvious exception to
this latter point), most notably the mass media. Clearly, there is a political (critical)
dimension to this distinction. For Hoggart, high culture is elitist because it imposes
middle-class values and tastes onto other groups. Popular or folk culture is something
that must be preserved in the face of mass-produced culture which serves only the
interests of capital accumulation, and is essentially alien to those people who consume
it en masse.
As these various definitions of culture indicate, the study of culture and the mass
media draws on a range of theoretical perspectives and traditions. These include
Marxism, linguistics, structuralism, postmodernism and feminism. What each of these
otherwise diverse ways of thinking about culture share in common is the view that
to understand culture in contemporary societies, we must consider its production,
transmission, dissemination and reception. In each of these stages, the mass media
plays an increasingly important role, but so too do other forms of communication
technology such as the internet, for instance, which many people use to bypass or
undermine the accumulation imperatives of global media corporations. Websites that
facilitate the exchange of music files are one notable example of this. Groups such as
Adbusters have also used the internet to challenge the hegemonic power of global
branding and advertising.
Broadly speaking, the term mass media refers to technologies of communication
that are able to broadcast to a mass audience. Mass media include newspapers (tab-
loids and broadsheets), radio, magazines, books, websites, and so on. The information
transmitted can be designed to induce sales, to inform or to entertain (although it is
often hard to distinguish between these aims). Increasingly, in magazines for instance,
so-called ‘advertorials’ provide guidance and advice – on skincare, for example, at the
same time as trying to sell us a particular product. This social significance of the mass
media is indicated by the way in which the use of the term has changed. It is technically
a plural term (‘media’ implying a range of communication forms and mechanisms), but
now tends to be used in the singular (the mass media) denoting its emergence as
a relatively homogenous social institution.
What is perhaps of most sociological interest, however, is the term ‘mass’, which
refers to the ability of these various communication technologies to reach a mass
audience. This capacity has contributed significantly to the idea that the world has
‘shrunk’. Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this is that words such as ‘Coca-
Cola’ and ‘McDonald’s’ have not only become global brands but also universally
recognised forms of communication understood in every language throughout the
world. This suggests that the mass media has resulted in a process of cultural homogen-
isation, and has led some commentators to argue that a process of McDonalization

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has occurred in recent decades. The ‘McDonaldization thesis’, as it has come to be

known, asserts that local, popular cultures have begun to be swamped by a
McDonaldized, global, mass culture (Ritzer, 1996).
Cultural studies then, has been concerned with the history of culture and its social
significance. The distinction in cultural studies between high culture, popular culture
and mass culture, the role of the mass media and the emergence of what has been
termed ‘media culture’ have all been the focus of key debates in cultural studies. These
debates have been based largely on the distinction between mass culture and popular
culture, with some sociologists and cultural theorists arguing that popular culture has
become obsolete or excluded from the age of the mass media, while others have
argued that there is still room and, indeed, critical potential for a range of cultural
forms and expressions.

Cultural studies as ideology studies

The idea that popular culture has been taken over by media culture which generates
and transmits values and beliefs rather than reflects cultural practices and traditions
of everyday life draws heavily on a Marxist perspective. This approach emphasises
that society (including the culture industries that produce the mass media) is run in
the interests of a minority social class who own most of society’s wealth and so exercise
power over society as a whole. This idea, while challenged by other perspectives,
remains perhaps the most influential in cultural studies.
As noted in Chapter 1, there are two main ways in which the term ideology is
used in the social sciences. A standard, dictionary definition describes ideology as a
body of ideas and beliefs used as the basis for social or political action. The term is also
used to refer to the scientific study of those ideas. In the common-sense definition, the
emphasis is largely on ideology as ideas. A more radical, Marxist-derived definition is
of ideology as the presentation of the interests of a particular group or individual as
those of the whole of society (e.g. patriarchal ideology). This definition assumes
asymmetrical power relations and a system of social stratification (see Chapter 3).
This is the version of ideology that we most commonly encounter in the social sciences,
and particularly in sociology and cultural studies. Here the focus is on the interests
served by particular ideas, rather than simply the ideas themselves.

A Marxist theory of ideology

For Marx, those who own and control the means of material production (the ruling
class) also own and control the production and dissemination of ideas. Dominant ideas,
for Marx, help to maintain the economic system (the capitalist mode of production).
Ideology represents a distorted form of knowledge. It is not simply lies, but refers to
those ideas generated to conceal what Marx believed were contradictions in the way
social and economic life was organised within capitalism. Ideology helped to maintain
the dominant position of those who owned and controlled the means of production.
As we have suggested, this usually takes the form of portraying the interests of this

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particular group as those of society as a whole. This is summed up in Marx’s assertion:

‘The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas: the class which is
the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.’
When Marx was writing, principles of hard work, loyalty, honesty and punctuality were
propagated as universal human values, often backed – as Weber emphasised – by
religious ideology, to ensure that working people were kept in their place.

Gramsci and hegemony

A Marxist theory of ideology is based on the idea that ordinary people believe what
they are told by their superiors. This tends to result in a very monolithic view of power,
one that denies the ability of people to ‘see through’ ideology. This problem was
addressed in the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing in the 1920s and
1930s. Gramsci focused on the role of the individual in maintaining social inequality.
He argued that ideology only works if it resonates in some way with people’s everyday
lived experiences. In this way, it does not present what appears to be a false vision of
the world, but one that seeks to explain life with a particular slant.
Gramsci maintained that ideology is effective because it is not simply imposed
but is negotiated. Dominant groups maintain their powerful position by achieving
moral and intellectual leadership, not simply by imposing their will on others by force.
Adopting Gramsci’s perspective, it could be argued that the mass media has become
a prime site on which such ‘negotiations’ take place. This intellectual and moral
leadership, achieved through dominant ideas, is what Gramsci termed ‘hegemony’.
This describes a type of power that is achieved and maintained through dominant
ideas engendering negotiation and consent, rather than by force.

Structuralism and ideology

While Gramsci was concerned with the role of the individual in maintaining social
inequality, the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser in the 1950s and 1960s,
while influenced by Gramsci, essentially developed Marx’s theory of ideology in pre-
cisely the opposite direction. Althusser focused largely on the role of social structures
in maintaining ideology and hence, social inequality. Ideology is transmitted, Althusser
argued, through what he termed ideological state apparatuses (ISAs).
Althusser makes a distinction between two dimensions of the capitalist state:
repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) which include the police, government, the armed
forces, and so on (those that rely on the use of force to maintain control) and ideological
state apparatuses (ISAs). The latter include religion, education, the family and the mass
media; those institutions that we would identify as agents of socialisation, and which
rely on the use of ideas to persuade and coerce rather than force compliance. ISAs are
those institutions that are deemed to equip us with the kind of consciousness we need
to function within the relations of production as these are organised within capitalism.
Education, for example, teaches us to be punctual and compliant, advertising teaches
us that we should work hard to achieve more and that we should be judged by our
material worth, and so on.

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Ideology has been understood in various ways in the social sciences, then, and in
cultural studies has tended to be conceptualised according to a Marxist theory of
ideology, particularly as this has been developed in Gramsci’s concept of hegemony
and in Althusser’s concern with ideological state apparatuses. The function of ideology
from a Marxist perspective is to serve the interests of the powerful by mystifying their
power. In other words, by making their relatively powerful position and their unequal
share of society’s wealth seem natural or immutable, and by inducing us to desire (at
least some aspects of) the status quo, even though it disempowers most people. As
the basis for a critical approach to the sociology of culture, what Marxist perspectives
emphasise is the importance of being aware that media images may not be neutral or
disinterested but rather, serve particular interests and communicate particular
messages. Sociologists have been particularly concerned to devise ways of uncovering
these often hidden or ‘coded’ meanings and messages.

Studying media culture

There are two main methods that sociologists have used to analyse media and cultural
representations, namely content analysis and semiotics. While this sounds relatively
straightforward, the choice of research methods in sociology is often complex (see
Chapter 13). Rather than delving too deeply into philosophical debates on method-
ology, which we consider in more detail in Chapter 13, our focus here is specifically
on how sociologists have devised ways of studying cultural forms.

Content analysis

One of the most popular methods of analysing media texts – content analysis – is
a largely quantitative method of data collection. This means that content analyses of
media culture are concerned primarily with the collection of data that can be subject
to statistical analysis. Content analysis is a research technique that involves counting
the number of times an item (an image or word, for instance) appears in a particular
text. Its main strength is its ability to produce quantitative data that is often relatively
easy to analyse, although large-scale or longitudinal content analyses often involve
very complex systems of data collection and analysis. Content analysis proceeds from
the assumption that there is a relationship between the frequency with which a certain
item (e.g. a woman washing up) appears in a media text (e.g. a television soap opera)
and the impact it has on society more generally, through its audience.
Content analysis therefore involves a concern with the frequency with which
certain items (events, words, images, relationships) appear in a given media text, with
the significance or prominence of these items within the text, and with how many
times the item is expressed in conjunction with positive or negative connotations (e.g.
how many times a Black man is shown as the ‘bad guy’ and a white person as the
‘hero’ in a film). Content analysis is concerned not simply with the content of media
texts, but also with their context. It was employed in a number of relatively early studies
of media representations, particularly of representations of gender in magazines,
romantic fiction and in advertising.

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Its strengths are that it provides a useful means of substantiating general obser-
vations, it generates easily quantifiable data, and is relatively cheap and easy to
undertake. However, sociological studies that rely solely on content analysis have
been criticised because they only recognise the obvious or immediate meanings (and
hence tend to ignore the symbolic nature of much media imagery, particularly in
advertising for instance). Content analysis, like many other sociological research
methods, is also highly subjective in so far as it is dependent upon the researcher’s
interpretation of what is important and what is not. Most crucially, content analysis
neglects wider structures of economic, political and cultural power, and the absence
of explanatory theories which can account for say, sex-role stereotyping, has also been
identified as a major weakness (Strinati, 1995). While content analysis has been a useful
method of analysing media representations (it is still one of the most popular methods
in sociology) it has some notable limitations, therefore. A more in-depth, analytical
approach – semiotics – is also a popular method of studying media culture, and one
that has also been used extensively by feminists.

Semiotics

Semiotics or semiology is the study of signs. These include: ‘images, gestures, musical
sounds, objects and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of
ritual, convention or public entertainment’ (Barthes, 1967, p. 9). Semiologists argue that
signs have no intrinsic or fixed meanings. Instead, their meaning is arbitrary and is
derived from the way they relate to other words and signs; in other words, to their
cultural reference points. Both semiology (and the structuralism from which it derives)
have had an important influence on the study of mass media and popular culture.
Semiotics derives from the work of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. In his Course in General Linguistics (1974; originally
published in English in 1959), he made a crucial distinction between two components
of a sign – the signifier and the signified. According to Saussure, any linguistic sign
such as a word or phrase can be broken down into these two elements of which it
is composed. In the linguistic sign, the signifier is the ‘sound image’ (the word as it is
actually written down or said), and the signified is the concept – the object or idea which
is being referred to. Saussure maintained that because the meanings of particular
linguistic signs are not externally determined but derive from their place in the overall
structure of language (what he calls langue), it follows that the relationship between
the signifier and the signified is a purely arbitrary one. This is because there is no
intrinsic, natural or essential reason why a particular concept should be linked with one
sound or written image rather than another. What we think of as a ‘table’ for instance
(the signified or idea of a table) could just as easily be signified by the word (or signifier)
‘dog’ for instance, as long as it became part of the ‘langue’ or structure of language
within which the sign operates. Hence, signs cease to be arbitrary and assume relatively
stable meanings once they are located within the general structure of language.
Saussure’s work emphasised that language can be studied as a semiological system
of signs which express ideas. This approach has come to be known as ‘structural
linguistics’ and, as Strinati (1995) notes, laid the foundations for more recent attempts

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to extend the analytical potential of structuralism and semiology to other systems of

meaning, such as media and popular culture.
Applied to the mass media and popular culture, semiotics is concerned with
analysing the content of a media form or text as a system of signs. This often involves
mapping out the broader cultural meanings – or connotations – of particular signs
in relation to each other, in order to discern underlying patterns of meaning not
just within language (as in structural linguistics) but in culture more generally. The
French social anthropologist Lévi-Strauss is well known for introducing the concepts
and methods of structuralism into the sociological study of culture, and for using
semiology to study the myths circulating in pre-industrial societies.
As Strinati (1995) also notes, however, the semiological study of popular culture
probably owes most to Roland Barthes, and in particular his book Mythologies
(originally published in 1957). Here Barthes develops the idea that the function of a
myth is ‘to transform history into nature’ (1973, p. 140). ‘Myth’ for Barthes is a system
of communication, or a mode of signification, that is grounded in social relations.
Hence, while retaining the analytical value of the distinctions made by structural
linguistics, Barthes suggests that for studying myths it is more appropriate to think
of the signifier as a cultural form, the signified as a concept, and the sign as a system of
cultural signification. Using these concepts, Barthes argues that myth works through
the particular relationships between form, concept and signification. Some signs
(their forms and concepts) are iconic (that is, their meanings are relatively universal),
whereas others are culturally specific and are dependent upon a range of cultural
connotations for their cultural associations to be conveyed, he argued.
Despite its significance as a method of cultural analysis – Judith Williamson’s
Decoding Advertisements (1978) is a notable example of a semiotic approach to media
studies – one of the main problems associated with semiological analysis is that there
is no way of ‘objectively’ discerning the meanings in a particular text. Semiology is
always likely to give rise to arbitrary opinions. As Strinati (1995) notes, one of the
biggest problems is that of ‘empirical validation’ – ‘how do we discriminate between
these interpretations?’ (p. 123).
One response to this criticism has been to suggest that texts contain a number
of different messages; they are polysemic. Semiology from this perspective is not
intended to be scientific in claiming to uncover the hidden meaning but rather to tease
out a range of otherwise hidden ways of interpreting a particular text. However, as
Strinati (1995) has also pointed out, this might be seen to undermine the credibility of
semiology as a method. In his view, scientific criteria still need to be established in order
to determine the limits which can be set on meanings and interpretations.

Sociological perspectives on media culture

Sociologists have developed various concepts and methods for considering the mass
media and popular culture. They have drawn attention, for instance, to the ‘political
economy’ of the mass media, emphasising how the ownership and control of the major
means of communication have come to be concentrated in the hands of a few global
corporations. Sociologists have argued that these powerful economic interests work

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to consistently exclude those groups lacking economic or cultural power (Murdock and
Golding, 1977). This is just one view however; sociologists have devised a range of
theoretical perspectives that attempt to make sense of the relationship between the
various aspects of culture considered above, namely high culture, popular or folk
culture, and media culture, as well as the impact of contemporary media culture on
social relations and identities. The term ‘contemporary’ is slightly misleading in this
respect because one of the most influential approaches is based on material written
between the 1930s and the 1960s. Nevertheless, much of this work, many sociologists
and cultural theorists have argued, remains deeply influential and highly relevant to
a sociological analysis of media culture.

The Frankfurt School and the critique of mass culture

What has come to be known as the Frankfurt School describes a school of thought
associated with the work of a group of intellectuals and scholars who were all members
of, or associated with, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt,
which was set up in 1923. Known collectively as the Frankfurt School, key members
were Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Leo
Lowenthal. It is important to stress that not all of the individuals associated with
this group agreed with each other. Indeed, many of their most important insights grew
out of their disagreements. Nevertheless, they shared a number of concerns and came
from a common intellectual heritage. They were all essentially concerned with why
Marx’s revolutionary predictions had never come to fruition; with why, despite the
continual instability of capitalism as an economic system, and the misery it caused
to millions of people, a Marxist revolution had never come about. Instead, Europe had
witnessed the rise of a totalitarian regime in Stalinist Russia, and of Nazism in Germany
and Fascism in Italy. As a group of Marxist, Jewish intellectuals, living in Germany in
the 1920s and 1930s, they were particularly concerned to understand why fascism
had succeeded where socialism seemed to have failed. In particular they were
concerned to understand the role of culture, and particularly the rapidly expanding
mass media, in keeping the masses docile and compliant.
Perhaps the most important analysis of culture produced by the Frankfurt School
was written by two of its leading members, Adorno and Horkheimer, in an essay entitled
‘The Culture Industry’ (originally published in 1944). In this essay, they argued that
popular culture is in fact produced by industrial capitalism in order to maintain the
repressive social relations upon which it is dependent. Comprised of cinema, publishers,
advertising agencies, record companies, and the like, what they termed the ‘culture
industry’ had one primary function according to Adorno and Horkheimer: mass decep-
tion. As such, the culture industry, they argued, turns people into passive, consuming
vessels incapable of discriminating between what they really need and what they are
told they want (and should have) – namely standardised, homogenised, mass-produced
cultural products that people are led to believe are original and individual.
Adorno and Horkheimer were particularly critical of the way in which the culture
industry produces and promotes goods and services that purport to promote
individuality, novelty and cultural expression. In their view, this is an illusion and

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the products of the culture industry are actually standardised, predictable and highly
regulated. They stifle rather than encourage creativity. This ensures that their
consumption remains stable and unquestioned.
This view is particularly evident in Adorno’s work on popular jazz music of the
1930s and 1940s which, he argued, was incredibly standardised and formulaic (much
like the boy/girl band or the Pop Idol/Popstars genre today, pieces of music were
the same in their core structure but different enough at a superficial level to main-
tain the idea that each one was novel and original). Adorno argued that, in this sense,
jazz could be distinguished from classical music, which had resisted incorporation into
mass culture.
Yet the Frankfurt School’s position was not simply one of cultural elitism (although
they have been accused of this) – their critique was a fundamentally political one. For
Adorno, the basic problem with the products of the culture industry was that they
promoted passivity and conformity. With reference to jazz and popular music, Adorno
referred to this as ‘regressive listening’, producing a state in which the listener remains
almost childlike and unable to face up to anything that challenges his or her sense of
order and predictability. As Adorno (1991, p. 9) said of the culture industry, ‘by craftily
sanctioning the demand for rubbish it inaugurates total harmony’.
Herbert Marcuse also explored the role of media culture in capitalist societies in
his book One Dimensional Man (1986; originally published in 1964). Marcuse agreed
with Adorno that the culture industry was little more than a tool of mass repression,
giving the illusion of free choice while at the same time closing down opportunities for
genuinely free thought and action. Marcuse distinguished between what he termed
‘true needs’ and ‘false needs’. True needs are those that are essential human needs such
as autonomy, creativity and liberty. False needs are those defined as essential by the
culture industry and refer largely to consumer goods such as cars, TVs, and so on
– those that we sell our labour power to buy, in order to achieve what Marcuse saw
as a false sense of fulfilment. False needs are thus defined as true needs by the culture
industry, Marcuse argued. In another book, Eros and Civilization (1972 [1955]), he
argued that even the most intimate aspects of our lives – sexual relations – have
become commodified and commercialised. As we noted in Chapter 8, sex is used to
sell a range of products from tyres to ice cream. Because of the expansion of mass
culture, for Marcuse, society has become one-dimensional. Unlike Adorno, however,
Marcuse did not see high culture as our ‘salvation’, but as increasingly commercialised
as well. Rather, he hoped a revolutionary movement would develop amongst those
who rejected material culture – most notably, students.
The ideas associated with the Frankfurt School have been subject to a number of
criticisms by sociologists and cultural theorists. Dominic Strinati (1995) for instance
argues that their analyses lack empirical evidence, that their work is grounded in a
cultural elitism and is expressed in terms that are highly intellectually demanding. Also
Marcuse’s designation of ‘true’ and ‘false’ needs is problematic – who defines which
are which? If a person needs cosmetic surgery to improve his or her psychological well-
being is this a ‘true’ or a ‘false’ need? If a family need a washing machine to keep their
children’s clothes clean, is this ‘true’ or ‘false’?
The work of the Frankfurt School has had a massive impact on sociological
perspectives on culture, particularly in relation to debates about mass and popular

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culture, about the mass production and dissemination of culture, and its effects on the
way we think and act. Their work effectively laid the foundation for a critical approach
to mass culture within sociology, one that has been subsequently developed in a
number of ways, one of which is George Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis.

The McDonaldization thesis

The origins of George Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis can be found in Weber’s critique
of rationalisation. Writing in the nineteenth century (an era of rapid modernisation),
Weber argued that a process of rationalisation was a defining feature of modern
societies. Rationalisation, in his work, refers to the increasing centrality of rational
calculation and the pursuit of efficiency in all aspects of economic, social and cultural
life. Rationalisation means that everything must be done in accordance with the most
efficient and effective means possible. Efficiency and effectiveness become the
overriding, instrumental concerns. This idea forms the basis of Ritzer’s thesis.
Originally published in 1992, The McDonaldization of Society presents Ritzer’s
somewhat pessimistic vision of an increasingly disenchanted world; one in which the
straitjacket of rules and regulations feared by Weber has become a reality. The victory
of instrumental rationality is epitomised, for Ritzer, by the practices and procedures of
the McDonald’s fast food chain. Effectively, the contemporary version of what Weber
terms rationalisation, Ritzer terms McDonaldization.
For Ritzer, McDonaldization is based on four key principles:

1 efficiency (food is prepared off site, there is minimum choice);

2 calculability (the exact time it should take to prepare and serve is specified);
3 predictability (no matter where you are in the world, a Happy Meal or a Big Mac
should be the same);
4 control (non-human technologies dictate production and consumption rhythms).

The concept of McDonaldization is more than simply a metaphorical device, however.

Ritzer argues that the instrumental logic that has made McDonald’s such a profitable
organisation can be identified in every dimension of contemporary capitalist societies,
facilitated particularly through the continual introduction of what he terms ‘new means
of consumption’.
Ritzer argues that the continual emergence of new means of consumption
is having a major impact on the ways in which people spend their leisure time and
money. By new means of consumption, he means the technologically driven modes
of standardised consumption including fast food restaurants, home shopping channels,
online shopping websites, credit and store card spending, and so on. Related to this is
the explosion of consumption as a means of entertainment. For instance, Disneyland
and Disneyworld, while ostensibly amusement parks are, at the same time, giant
shopping malls for Disney products. In this sense, Ritzer argues, McDonaldization
represents a process that impacts upon every aspect of our lives, particularly in terms
of the way in which we consume culture. In many ways, this perspective is similar to
the approach taken by the Frankfurt School (whose work Ritzer draws on) in that it

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suggests that cultural products, such as music, films, books, package holidays, and so
on, are available to us primarily in a sterile, standardised form (produced according to
commercially successful formulae).
Why should we be concerned about McDonaldization, though, if it provides us
with what we want? Following Weber, and also the work of the Frankfurt School,
Ritzer’s position on this is that the various dimensions of McDonaldization outlined
above are fundamentally detrimental, in the long term, to human society. He argues
that at the heart of what professes to be a process of rationalisation lies something
essentially irrational – the denial of humanity’s creativity, imagination and autonomy
(what many would argue are the very qualities that make us ‘human’). Human
beings are effectively reduced to little more than cogs in huge machines that are
essentially producing nothing of any real value to humanity, critics of mass culture
argue. From this perspective, popular culture has become an obsolete term, because
McDonaldization has swallowed up opportunities for us to devise our own cultural
forms and practices so that everything is commercially produced, derived or driven.
The McDonaldization thesis, then, is a contemporary version of a much older
dimension of sociological theory, derived largely from Weber’s critique of ration-
alisation and, with regard to the critique of mass culture at least, developed in the
Frankfurt School’s work on the culture industry (itself grounded in a Marxist theory
of ideology). To what extent we should take this dystopian vision seriously, of course,
depends on our acceptance or otherwise of a number of propositions upon which
Ritzer’s thesis, and critical theories of mass culture more generally, rest.
Most fundamentally, such approaches tend to emphasise the idea that the media
does something to us – it indoctrinates us with ideologically driven ideas and attitudes.
Yet they focus primarily on the production of cultural texts, rather than their con-
sumption and reception. In doing so, these largely structuralist approaches tend to
underplay the role of agency – the ability of human beings as thinking, speaking and
acting subjects to make sense of (and influence) their social environment. In contrast
to the work of the Frankfurt School and to Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis, an emphasis
on reception and consumption and on agency (on the way in which we make sense
of, and respond to, media culture) has underpinned the work of two other important
approaches to the study of mass media and popular culture, namely the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, and the
Glasgow University Media Research Group’s audience reception studies.
Both groups have drawn heavily on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony outlined
above, in their focus on the ways in which individuals and groups negotiate media
representations and forms. In particular, they have emphasised not simply the sig-
nificance of production, but also transmission, dissemination and reception in
understanding media culture. They argue that we need to give more attention than the
Frankfurt School did to the part we all play in keeping particular ideologies alive, but
also in challenging and resisting them.

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CCCS and counter-hegemony

To recap, Gramsci (writing in the 1920s and 1930s) argued that ideology is maintained
because it is not simply imposed but is negotiated. Dominant groups maintain their
powerful position by achieving moral and intellectual leadership – by dominating
through ideas, rather than force. The term derives from the Italian egemonia meaning
dominant or powerful ideas. Gramsci suggests that ideologies are not simply imposed,
then, but are the outcome of negotiation. The mass media, it could be argued, has
become a prime site on which such negotiations take place.
Both the Birmingham CCCS and the Glasgow Media Research Group drew
attention to the potential for counter-hegemony in Gramsci’s writing. This refers to the
ability of individuals and groups to challenge, resist, renegotiate and reappropriate
dominant ideas and representations, and places the emphasis on culture as a site of
struggle and contestation, rather than mass deception.
The Birmingham CCCS focused on what they termed the ‘circuits of production,
circulation and consumption’ (Johnson, 1986) of cultural texts. They argued that it
follows that if we are located at one particular point in a circuit, we cannot ‘see’ the
whole or other parts of it, and seeing the whole or the totality is the task of cultural
studies. CCCS were critical of the Frankfurt School (and Adorno in particular) for
focusing too closely on the production of cultural forms and so giving insufficient
attention to reception and consumption. They argued that this focus on production
creates two particular problems. First, it infers that cultural forms are consumed as
they are produced, instead of being rejected or reappropriated. Second, they argued,
mass culture theories tend to ignore the elements of production in reception – of
popular culture as a site of creativity and resistance. CCCS tended to concentrate,
instead of on standardisation and homogenisation, on the potential for creativity in
the ways in which certain cultural products and forms are consumed. Their work
highlighted, for instance, the ways in which people customise mass produced goods,
reappropriate cultural images or subvert dominant ideologies by imbuing them with
counter-hegemonic meanings.

Audience reception studies

One of the main analytical categories used by CCCS and the Glasgow Media Research
Group to consider how people receive and respond to the messages transmitted
by the mass media is ‘audience’. This term refers to ‘the groups and individuals add-
ressed and often partly “constructed” by the media industries’ (Branston and Stafford,
1996, p. 309). An important term to consider here is ‘constructed’. This suggests
that audiences are defined, at least in part, by the media in their targeting of certain
demographic groups with products they are seeking to market. Thus, identifiable
audiences are actually ‘created’ by products that draw people into a relationship of
production and consumption.
Take, for example, the rise of the so-called ‘New Man’ in the 1990s. This particular
media and marketing construction coincided with developments in advertising that
were moving from product- to lifestyle-based campaigns. More sophisticated techniques
of market research were uncovering changes in male and female roles and expecta-

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tions. Men were more likely to be single well into adulthood (see Chapter 6), and
also carrying out a range of household tasks including food shopping. Women were also
increasingly working outside of the home, many on a full-time basis (see Chapter 9).
The ‘New Man’ therefore became an effective advertising theme (Athena’s L’Enfant
poster, a black and white image featuring a man who is naked from the waist up and
holding a newborn baby, was supposedly their best-selling poster).
One of the founder members of the Birmingham CCCS who has studied the
influence of the mass media is Stuart Hall. Hall’s analysis of audience reception was
based largely on the semiotic insights of Saussure and Barthes considered above. He
argued that media images often have ideological messages embedded or hidden
within them; he termed this ‘encoding’ – the process of loading particular cultural
forms (such as advertisements) with hidden meanings. Hall also emphasised that
audiences are often able to identify this ideological content – to ‘see through’ the
encoded meanings, and so resist the ideological effects of the media. He referred to
this as ‘decoding’ (Hall, 1980). Hence, the mass media is deemed to involve:

PRODUCTION ↔ Encoding ↔ MEDIA TEXT/CODE ↔ Decoding ↔ CONSUMPTION

Hall argued that processes of encoding and decoding result in three types of
audience reception:

1 dominant (where the reader agrees with the preferred reading offered by the text);
2 oppositional (where the preferred reading is recognised but rejected);
3 negotiated (where the reader subjects elements of the text to acceptance; others to
rejection or refinement).

This raises the questions: What factors influence reception? What shapes how
audiences decode or interpret symbolic messages in the media? Hall argued that we
have to understand not only the production of cultural products but also the conditions
of their reception and consumption.
The work of the Glasgow Media Group has also focused on audience perceptions
of media coverage. In a similar way to the Birmingham CCCS, their work has con-
cluded that what we understand and believe about media messages is based on both
power structures within the text (encoded or preferred meanings), and power structures
outside of the text (those shaped by social class, gender, race and ethnicity, global
power relations, and so on).

Youth culture and rebellion

Another key aspect of media culture that sociologists have been concerned with is the
role of youth cultures, and particularly what they have termed sub- or countercultures.
The study of youth subcultures has, for around forty years or so, been an impor-
tant focal point for the sociological analysis of mass media and popular culture. Yet
the term youth culture has lost much of its sociological pertinence. Until recently, the
appearance and disappearance of youth subcultures, marked by their own particular
styles of dress, music, language and cultural codes, was a major feature of urban life.

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Today, however, there seems to be a considerable fragmentation of styles and, at the

same time, a decline in the idea of youth rebellion and dissatisfaction. Sociologists
have recently tried to reflect on why this might be the case.
The idea of a youth subculture really only emerged after the Second World War,
initially in the US, and slightly later in the UK and Europe and other Western societies.
The term implied that young people had come to share a similar social and economic
position and thereby had similar interests and concerns. The term also suggested that
young people were involved in some kind of rebellion against previous generations.
This latter emphasis became particularly prominent in sociology and cultural studies
in the 1960s and 1970s, and was a recurring theme in the work of the Birmingham
CCCS. They argued that the development of youth subcultures must be understood
within its socio-economic context, and effectively analysed young people as if they
constituted a social class.
In many Western societies, and particularly so in Britain, the 1950s were a period
of post-war prosperity, economic expansion and relatively full employment and,
particularly, of relative working-class affluence. The Conservative Government, under
the prime-ministership of Harold Macmillan, declared that the majority of the
population in the UK had ‘never had it so good’. As we noted in Chapter 5, the imple-
mentation of the 1944 Butler Education Act and the establishment of the NHS and
the welfare state had given young people greater access to education and cultural
resources, and had eradicated many of the fears associated with unemployment and
ill health. Within this context, age began to emerge as a new social divider, whereas
class seemed to be becoming less important (see Chapter 4). People began to refer to
‘the generation gap’.
Armed with their new financial independence and the opportunity to be in
education for longer, young people began to have not only the inclination but also the
means to express their own interests, ideas and values. They began to constitute a
new audience and a distinct market for the products of the culture industry, one that
did not go unexploited.
Yet, to an extent, the ‘never had it so good’ culture was something of a political
myth. Of course, not everybody was well off. The work of sociologist Peter Townsend
in the 1960s emphasised the continued existence of widespread poverty in the UK.
It also became clear that credit was beginning to play an increasing role in the devel-
opment of consumer culture. This meant that the idea of a homogenous youth culture
began to be perceived as problematic. Sociologists such as Stuart Hall also pointed
out that youth cultures were also shaped by racial and ethnic inequalities, which needed
to be understood within the context of post-war patterns of immigration.
Many sociologists writing in the 1960s and 1970s began to perceive youth
subcultures as expressions of struggle between young people and the dominant values
of society. Sociologists such as Paul Willis in his (1977) book Learning to Labour began
to argue that it is through youth subcultures that resistance takes place, but that this
resistance is rarely consciously political. Rather, it is a form of resistance that takes
place at the level of style, or appearance.
Phil Cohen (1980) examined the situation of working-class young men in London’s
East End and argued that they were caught in a tension between traditional working-
class values and middle-class affluence. Subcultures were therefore an expression of

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this tension between traditional (popular) culture and mass-produced, consumer

culture. Skinheads, for instance, could be seen as developing a style based on a very
(albeit stereotypical and exaggerated) traditional working-class masculinity. Their
tendency towards nationalism and racism could also be understood as an ill-conceived
attempt to restore some notion of ‘community’ during an era of rapid social change.
Similar arguments have been made about Mods in the 1960s, and in relation to the
1980s Mod revival. Namely, that their style was an expression both of traditional
working-class identity and of (aspirational) middle-class consumer culture.
A more complex analysis of this tension in youth subcultures was developed
by Dick Hebdige (1979) who drew on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (considered
above), and also on French anthropologist Roland Barthes’s work on semiology, to
argue that youth cultures appropriate certain objects, artefacts and symbols from
mainstream culture and ascribe them with new and different meanings. Hebdige uses
certain concepts in his analysis of youth culture that are important to consider in this
respect. In particular, he uses the term ‘homology’ which refers to the study of particular
styles, attitudes and symbols (cultural forms) that reflect the concerns of particu-
lar groups (e.g. a study of the cultural differences between those who ride motorbikes
and those who ride scooters would focus on the homology of each group – on the
cultural beliefs, practices and forms that bind them together as a group). In this context,
Hebdige’s work also emphasises the importance of ‘re-articulation’. By this he means
the practice of attributing a particular (often political) meaning to certain cultural forms
(words, images, and so on) that is different from, but related to, their accepted or
dominant (hegemonic) meaning. Examples might include gay men calling each other
‘queers’, Black men and women calling each other ‘niggers’, or women calling each
other ‘girls’. A related term, developed initially by Lévi-Strauss and adopted by Hebdige
in his work on youth subcultures, is ‘bricolage’. Deriving from the French term for DIY,
meaning literally ‘to rearrange’, bricolage refers to the process of re-ordering and
recontextualising objects in order to communicate new meanings. Examples might
include feminists wearing Doc Martin boots (traditionally signifiers of masculine
power), Goths wearing crucifixes or (as one of us saw in a busy shopping area recently)
a mobility scooter used by a disabled woman adorned with Harley Davidson badges.
Often bricolage also involves the use of space, with particular groups appropriating
spaces in coffee shops and shopping centres in which they are otherwise relatively
marginalised or disempowered. In the case of Mods, for instance, sea fronts also
became important spaces for bricolage.
In his book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige (1979) focused on youth
subcultures among young African–Caribbean people who had been born in the
UK. The symbols associated with Rastafarianism were, he argued, used as symbols
of resistance to a dominant white culture. In a similar vein, he termed punk a form of
‘semiological guerilla warfare’, in which symbols such as the Union Jack, the Queen,
the national anthem, and so on were used (perhaps most famously by the London-
based punk group, the Sex Pistols) to signify a sense of alienation from the dominant
culture of the 1970s. Through this technique of ‘bricolage’, punks asserted their
identity as different from, and crucially as a rejection of, mainstream society. What this
research raises is an important conceptual difference between what sociologists call
‘subcultures’ and ‘countercultures’.

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Subcultures are groups whose members identify themselves as sharing a cultural

identity and belonging together that sets them apart from mainstream culture, but
who also identify themselves as being part of the mainstream. Such groups often share
languages, practices, beliefs, traditions and styles that reflect the dominant group
or culture, rather than reject it, but which also set them apart from it. This means
that members of a subculture may be aware of their separate identity, but also feel
conscious of the need to conform to the norms and values of the larger group in which
the subculture is embedded.
Subcultures are important sociologically because they are a source of social
and cultural diversity, but also because they can be important sites of social conflict and
negotiation. (This is partly why the Birmingham CCCS was so interested in youth sub-
cultures – because they can be regarded as key sites on which hegemonic struggle
takes place). This is especially the case in relation to countercultures.
Countercultures are cultural groups whose beliefs, practices, norms and values
derive from, but are at odds with and often strongly oppose or reject, those widely
accepted in society (in effect, a ‘contraculture’ – Macionis and Plummer, 2002, p. 109).
Countercultures are therefore understood to exist specifically as a site of conflict and
resistance; of counter-hegemony or what Stuart Hall and the Birmingham CCCS more
generally referred to as ‘oppositional readings’. Countercultures are often based on
the frustrations of marginalised groups; on varying degrees of non-conformity and
rebellion against mainstream culture.
Several points of critique can be made about the sociological focus on youth
subcultures and countercultures, and particularly the work of the Birmingham CCCS.
First, it is questionable whether youth cultures were ever really that radical (many
of the most influential people behind the punk movement in Britain were middle-class
musicians and designers, for instance). Angela McRobbie has argued that few youth
subcultures have ever been genuinely radical because most are highly patriarchal.
Most aspects of youth subcultures are also highly commodified, commercial and
apolitical. However, some commentators have argued recently that the impact of
new communication technologies, facilitating a whole range of mediated forms
of interaction, have given the concept of youth culture a new lease of life. Internet
chat rooms, mobile phones, computer games and websites designed for exchanging
music files might be thought of as new forms of culture around which oppositional
(e.g. anti-corporate capitalist) or at least distinct youth identities and styles can emerge
and flourish. Some sociologists have argued that many of the new media can be
understood as postmodern cultural forms.

Postmodern cultural forms

Over the past two decades or so, a group of postmodern social and cultural theorists
– perhaps the most notable being Jean Baudrillard – have begun to highlight the
centrality of the mass media in our lives. They have argued that media messages are
a new form of reality, one characterised by a range of postmodern cultural forms.
Baudrillard sees contemporary societies as concerned primarily with the consumption
of signs, and as characterised by what he calls ‘simulacra’. Simulacra are worlds of
media-generated signs and images (the term is derived from Plato, and describes ‘a

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copy which has no original’). Examples of simulacra might include Disney theme parks
or theme pubs that purport to replicate a ‘bygone’ era that historians argue never
actually existed in the form in which it is ‘represented’ here. Similarly, so-called ‘reality
TV’ shows such as Big Brother and Survivor collapse the distinction between reality and
representation; no longer does the media provide us with a copy of real life, it is a
reality of its own.
The idea that certain forms of media and popular culture are postmodern is based
on the premise that postmodernism is manifest in the world around us in particular
types of culture. Examples, according to Strinati (1995), might include cinema, music,
advertising or television. Modernist films tend to be realist (that is, claim to represent
or somehow relate to an external, objective reality – see Chapter 2). They tend to be
linear and logical in the way in which their plot, narrative and character development
proceeds. Films such as Blade Runner, Pulp Fiction or Mulholland Drive tend to be
described as postmodern because they question reality, contain critical or ironic
images of progressive modernity, are dominated by information technologies, and
have plots or narratives that problematise the idea that an external, objective reality
exists (Lyon, 1994). In Blade Runner, for instance, the action is set against a post-
industrial, urban wasteland teaming with roaming gangs. The respectable inhabitants
don’t leave their dehumanised enclaves, but instead communicate by means of the
omnipresent video screens. So-called postmodernism films are also described as ‘inter-
textual’. This means that they take many of their cultural reference points from other
media forms. The Austin Powers or Shrek films, for instance, make many intertextual
references to other films.
In music, postmodernism implies a conflation of the distinction between the
‘high’ and ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ forms of culture that we discussed above. In the 1980s,
one of the key figures associated with the punk movement in Britain, Malcolm
MacLaren released a single called Madame Butterfly that interspersed opera singing
with rap vocals and mingled Puccini’s original (translated) lyrics with new ones.
Similarly, the performance of opera music at the opening ceremonies of football
matches also signals a conflation of cultural forms, many would argue. Also apparent
within contemporary music, postmodernists would argue, is the idea of the ‘death of
the author’ – rather than performing cover versions of songs by ‘original’ artists, many
musicians now sample fragments of previously released pieces of music, integrating
them into something new to the extent that it is no longer possible (or meaningful) to
designate certain forms of music as ‘original’ and others as copies or ‘cover versions’.
Postmodern musical styles are therefore thought to be eclectic, fragmented and
defined by constant intertextuality, or references to other cultural forms and products
(Strinati, 1995). They might be thought of in terms of what Frederic Jameson (1991)
has described as ‘pastiche’ – cultural forms that are pieced together from a range
of different sources, none of which are thought to be ‘original’. Clearly, the impact of
technological developments, not least the expansion of the internet, has changed
the nature of music and of music production dramatically, particularly in terms of the
integration of computer-generated sounds into musical forms. Similarly, mechanisms
through which the products of the culture industry are disseminated have begun to
conflate – in the form of music television, for instance, which conflates a range of
media forms and products (Kellner, 1995).

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Similarly, dramatic changes that, many commentators argue, signal the emer-
gence of a postmodern era have also occurred in advertising. Much contemporary
advertising, for instance, makes no direct or even indirect reference to the product
itself, but instead focuses largely on what marketers describe as ‘lifestyle factors’.
Contemporary adverts also tend to rely heavily on intertextuality, parody and irony.
As Strinati puts it, advertisements nowadays

say less about the product directly, and are more concerned with sending up
or parodying advertising itself by citing other adverts, by using references drawn
from popular culture and by self-consciously making clear their status as
advertisements.
(Strinati, 1995, p. 232)

In his book America, Jean Baudrillard (1988) argued that ‘all we consume is signs’ and
by this he means that the act of consuming and being seen to have consumed a
particular product or brand, or even the packaging of the product, is often more
important than having the product itself.
One of the criticisms that is often made of the idea that certain cultural forms are
somehow postmodern is that many of the observations made by theorists of post-
modernity were anticipated by the Frankfurt School (the conflation of high and mass
or popular culture, for instance). However, whereas the criticisms of this process
made by Adorno, Marcuse, and the like were fundamentally of the mass deception
engendered by the culture industry, postmodern theorists tend not to share these
political concerns and instead emphasise the proliferation of choice and styles that
postmodernism has brought about. Instead of defining those who consume mass
culture as ‘dupes’ in the way the Frankfurt School arguably did, they highlight the
potential for creativity, irony and resistance, as well as for political opposition and
challenge in and through consumer culture – in the form of slogan T-shirts, for instance,
or practices of bricolage and reappropriation. In this sense, postmodern theorists adopt
and echo some of the insights of the earlier work of the Birmingham CCCS.

The feminist critique of cultural studies

The legacy feminists inherited from cultural studies must be understood in the context
of the history of cultural studies as a discipline, and stems from two distinct ideological
and institutional sources. The first derives from the historical and ethnographic work
on working-class popular culture, associated initially with writers such as Richard
Hoggart and Raymond Williams. Such work eventually, as we considered above,
informed the studies produced by the Birmingham CCCS. But their work, as we have
outlined so far, focused largely on issues such as class (and to a lesser extent race –
see CCCS, 1982) and youth subcultures. Feminists have highlighted the neglect of
sexual difference (the difference between men and women) in these studies.
The second aspect of the legacy feminists inherited from cultural studies involved
rescuing cultural forms associated with women’s everyday lives – soap operas, popular
fiction and magazines, and so on – from the realm of mass culture to which they had

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been assigned by malestream sociologists. Feminists tended to reject both the cultural
pessimism and intellectual elitism thought to be inherent in the Frankfurt School’s
ideas about mass culture. According to some feminists, cultural forms such as romantic
fiction, soap operas and magazines rather than being guilty of ideological manipulation
spoke to the ‘very real problems and tensions in women’s lives’ (Modleski, 1982, p. 14).
Others argued that the ideological messages inherent in these media forms were
fundamentally patriarchal, so that rather than casting them aside as sociologically
insignificant, feminists needed to develop a sustained critique of the ways in which
women were constructed and represented in them.
Since the 1970s, feminists have therefore developed a sustained critique of the role
of the mass media in perpetuating patriarchal ideologies, and in sustaining gender
oppression. Of course, this critique has in no sense been homogenous but has
developed several strands and opposing ideas.
One of the major points of critique made by feminists was to challenge the focus
on class in cultural studies which was inherited mainly from Marxist sociologists.
Feminists criticised their mode of theorising cultural forms. They argued that this mode
of theorisation excluded or marginalised gender analytically and women empirically;
it placed too much emphasis on men and, in particular, on male working-class and
youth cultures. They pointed out, for instance, that the theoretical models and method-
ologies of the Birmingham CCCS, particularly in the text Resistance Through Rituals,
demonstrated this focus on men and class, and thereby neglected women. The Centre’s
ethnographic studies of Teds, Skinheads and Mods, for instance, were undertaken
in the context of a class analysis and with reference to a discussion of class-based
hegemony derived from Gramsci (see above). In each case, the interest was in seeing
ways in which subcultural groups negotiated and resisted the dominant cultural
hegemony. Thus it was argued by feminists that the choice of these subcultures led to
the effective exclusion of the cultural practices and political identities of working-class
girls and women.
Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1976) were among the first writers to focus
on the role of girls in youth subcultures, in an attempt to correct what they say as the
male bias of previous studies. They argued that girls are present in subcultures but are
invisible in sociological studies of them. This is because they play different roles to boys
in subcultures and organise themselves differently; what can be discerned by feminist
research, they argued, is the existence of distinct, feminine subcultures. Moreover,
girls in their research had less spending power than boys; they were meant to be more
focused on the home and marriage, and were less visible on the streets.
McRobbie and Garber’s work was consistent with 1970s Marxist feminism in that
it argued that girls’ marginality in youth subcultures was related to the assumption
that women’s primary role was defined by the family and the household; by the private
sphere of reproduction. In effect they argued that consequently women and girls were
engaged in much less publicly observable activities than men or boys. However, they
pointed out that even when girls did participate in youth subcultures, their roles and
status tended to reflect their subordinate position in society generally. McRobbie
suggested that it would be more appropriate for sociologists for look for girls’ sub-
cultural activities in sites other than the streets. In her view, girls have a different
way of organising their cultural life. In explaining this she introduced the concept of

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‘bedroom culture’, arguing that most girls’ social lives take place in their bedrooms
because these are private spaces, inaccessible to teachers, boys or parents. McRobbie
and Garber (1976) also argued, however, that girls’ bedroom cultures cannot be defined
as resistant to the dominant cultures, in the way that some male-dominated youth
cultures are; rather, they concluded, most are highly dependent on manufactured,
standardised cultural forms such as boy band formulas.
In her (1978) book, Feminism and Youth Culture, McRobbie carried out an ethno-
graphic study of working-class girls, similar to the one undertaken by Paul Willis in
Learning to Labour. In this study, she explored in more depth the degree to which young
girls ‘resist’ the dominant culture. She observed and interviewed a group of girls aged
14–15 in a Birmingham youth club and found that although the girls accepted their
future roles as wives and mothers, and were immersed in a traditional ‘feminine’
culture, many expressed broader interests in social activities such as dancing, and
particularly in their friendship groups. Talk of marriage, the family, romance, fashion
and beauty were all part of their feminine, anti-school culture. Much like the ‘lads’ in
Willis’s study, McRobbie concludes that the girls she studied were not really oppo-
sitional in any meaningful way. Rather than resisting cultural hegemony and patriarchal
ideology, they ‘gently undermined’ it, she argued. McRobbie induced from this that
subcultures can function as effective agents of social control as the girls that took part
in her study effectively ended up doing exactly what was expected of them, namely
complying with the requirements of their gender role in a capitalist society – aspiring
to romance, marriage and motherhood.
These early studies carried out in the 1970s led feminists subsequently to analyse
the importance of femininity in relation to the mass media and popular culture, and
also to consider the construction of gendered subjectivity in a variety of cultural forms.
Ideas about class identity and resistance gave way to a more explicit focus on
femininity in a range of studies that also drew on the insights of earlier work in cultural
studies. A notable example is McRobbie’s (1991) work on Jackie (the best-selling
magazine for girls in the UK in the 1970s) and other girls’ magazines, which attempted
to trace the hidden meanings or ‘ideologies of femininity’ that such texts convey.
McRobbie argued that Jackie magazine mapped out every stage of the life course
for women, from childhood through womanhood to old age, in terms of a patriarchal
ideology of femininity. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, she argued that
girls’ magazines are an explicit attempt to win girls’ consent to the dominant social and
cultural order. In attempting to reveal how this is achieved, McRobbie adopted
a semiological mode of analysis which identified four ‘subcodes’ or strategies through
which Jackie appeals to its readership. These are: romance, domestic life, fashion and
beauty, and pop music.
In sum, McRobbie argued that magazines such as Jackie limit and shape femininity
in so far as they instruct girls on how to act, and convey what significant others (friends,
boyfriends, parents) expect of them. In McRobbie’s view, such magazines cannot be
dismissed as harmless nonsense because they function as powerful ideological forces
– in the case of young girls – in the 1970s, each week for several years. They are part
of the dominant ideology which is predicated upon girls’ future roles as wives and
mothers. The implication, according to McRobbie’s analysis, is that all readers will
inevitably succumb to the power of gendered ideology in this respect.

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In her later work, however, McRobbie (1994, 1996) revised her earlier reading of
magazines such as Jackie, and particularly her views on the ideologies of femininity
contained within their pages. Her underlying message was the same – that magazines
are an important part of the socialisation of girls and young women into their future
roles in a patriarchal–capitalist society. As she put it, magazines are ‘possibly the most
concentrated and uninterrupted media-scape for the construction of normative
femininity’ (McRobbie, 1996, p. 172). She also argued, however, that the content of
these magazines had changed considerably over time (see also McRobbie, 2000).
During the 1980s, she argued, there was a significant shift in both the form and
content of girls’ magazines. In terms of content, there was a shift away from the
traditional terrain of femininity towards a more liberated version. She also argued that
the ways in which young women read magazines changed; no longer uncritically
regarding them as informative or instructive, girls had begun to engage ‘knowingly’ and
ironically with their content. More generally, McRobbie argued, the emphasis on
romance dominant in Jackie had been replaced in magazines such as Just Seventeen
and More! by a greater emphasis on fashion, music, travel and careers, and this was
true of a range of girls’ and women’s magazines. Most strikingly, she argued, ‘there is
love and there is sex and there are boys, but the conventionally coded meta-narratives
of romance which . . . could only create a neurotically dependent female subject, have
gone for good’ (1994, p. 164).
According to McRobbie, this shift occurred as a result of a number of factors.
First, a greater awareness of sexual equality meant that girls began to reject notions
of female passivity and traditional sex-role stereotyping. It was recognised by magazine
editors, advertisers and writers that readers were more self-confident and found
romantic narratives irrelevant and old-fashioned. Second, developments in media
and cultural studies, and also in sociology, began (as we noted above) to focus more
on readership, and less on the production of cultural forms such as magazines, and
hence began to draw attention to the extent to which readers ‘negotiated meanings’.
Third, such approaches also emphasised the extent to which individuals were
beginning to be increasingly exposed to a diverse variety of media forms and hence,
were more likely to be read in fragments. In other words, magazines were more likely
than previously to be read ‘at a glance’, rather than from cover to cover.
McRobbie concluded that in the 1980s the new emphasis on individuality and
a display of personalised style was in marked contrast to the traditional ideologies of
femininity, and particularly of romance, that dominated magazines such as Jackie
in the 1970s. Ideologies of femininity remained prevalent, she argued, but were both
produced and consumed with a more confident, ironic edge than previously. But the
cost of this equality, according to McRobbie, is that girls were more caught up than
ever in a hectic cycle of consumerism, or what she has described as ‘an endless series
of imperatives to buy’ (McRobbie, 1996, p. 172).
Crucially, however, making the case for ‘a reappraisal of the pleasures of
femininity’ (1996, p. 175), McRobbie also argued that women’s enjoyment of magazines
should be taken seriously, particularly as a critique of malestream analyses of media
culture. In this respect, she emphasised that the millions of men and women who enjoy
lifestyle magazines, soap operas, and so on, should not be dismissed as passive dupes
of the culture industry or simply as the ‘victims’ of patriarchal ideology. Instead, she

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argued, sociological analysis should focus on the consumption of media texts and the
lived experience of popular culture.
McRobbie’s work has been subject to a number of criticisms, however, not least
because her initial analysis was largely semiological and, as we noted above, semiotics
has been subject to methodological criticism (see Strinati, 1995). McRobbie’s use of
the term ‘ideology’ has also been subject to critique. Frazer (1987), for instance, has
argued that McRobbie’s analysis tends to presume that only dominant ideas influence
the way people think and act; it neglects other factors, material ones for instance,
which shape the course of people’s lives. Frazer concludes that McRobbie’s analysis
is therefore too simplistic and overly deterministic. In particular, Frazer points out that
if texts are polysemic, that is open to multiple interpretation, then this must limit
their ideological effects. What McRobbie’s work, and subsequent criticisms of it (as well
as McRobbie’s reflections on these criticisms – see McRobbie, 2000), emphasise is
that cultural forms such as magazines are key sites where gendered meanings are
contested, and where dominant ideologies can be both disseminated and disturbed.
Other feminist sociologists have drawn attention to a wide range of media forms in
which gender ideology is both reinforced and challenged.

Feminist studies of media culture

A range of feminist approaches have examined the ways in which gender is con-
structed or represented in diverse forms of media such as advertising, women’s
magazines, films and soap operas. Early feminist work on media representations
tended to adopt a content analysis approach and examined gender stereotypes evident
in the mass media. These studies involved, for instance, noting the different roles
adopted by men and women in advertisements and counting the number of times
these occurred in a given sample. In relation to advertising, Dyer (1982) found women
to be routinely portrayed as stereotypically feminine, as sex objects, or as housewives
and mothers, whereas men are shown in positions of dominance and authority over
women, and in a much broader range of social roles.
Much of the impetus for early feminist critiques of media representations of men
and women came from the feeling that available images of women were inadequate,
generating the complaint that ‘women are not really like that’. Hence, it was suggested
that the media was guilty of sex-role stereotyping which was thus reinforced in wider
society. In other words, in the way it represented women, the media was thought
to be guilty of distorting the reality of women’s lives, portraying a fantasy world
rather than the one women actually live in. Although content analyses were useful in
providing a static picture of how women are represented in the media, some feminists
began to argue that these studies were merely descriptive, not explanatory. Content
analysis does not tell us anything, for instance, about where stereotypical represen-
tations come from in the first place, or about who has the power to define the so-called
‘objective reality’ that the media is purported to represent. Some feminists attempted
to study the role of the media itself in actively constructing ‘reality’. This shift in feminist
media analysis reflects what is often referred to as the ‘cultural turn’ in the social
sciences, and humanities more generally, and is marked by a shift from the dominance

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of realist perspectives on the social world, to a more social constructionist approach

(see Chapter 2). Hence, feminist analyses shifted away from the idea that the mass
media either represents or distorts an objective reality in which ‘real’ women live,
towards an emphasis on the belief that reality itself, including gender identities and
relations, is socially constructed and that the mass media plays a central role in this.

Gender in advertising

Almost from the beginning of the feminist movement, feminists responded critically
to images of women portrayed in advertising (much of it aimed at women, as the main
household consumers). Based primarily on content analyses of advertisements,
feminists such as Betty Friedan (1963) in her book The Feminine Mystique argued that
women were routinely portrayed either as housewives and mothers, or as sex objects.
Women are encouraged by adverts to view their bodies as objects, and thus as separate
from and more important than their subjective selves, and in need of constant alteration
and improvement. The implication is, as Naomi Wolf (1990) has pointed out in The
Beauty Myth, that the required level of bodily perfection can be achieved through
the purchasing and application of appropriate products. Feminists have also pointed
out that advertising frequently ‘symbolically dismembers’ women so that their bodies
are fragmented into various parts – women’s faces, legs, breasts, eyes, hair, and so on
all become the focus of consumption. This reduction of women to their body parts, it
is suggested, dehumanises and degrades women so that they are seen as less than fully
human, rather than as thinking, speaking, acting ‘whole’ subjects.
In her work on advertising (which adopted a content analysis approach), Gillian
Dyer (1982) argued that men are more likely to be depicted as independent; women
as dependent, and men are generally shown as having expertise and authority (for
example, as being objective and knowledgeable about particular products), whereas
women are often shown merely as consumers. She also found that in adverts focusing
on the home, the majority featured images of women but with male voice-overs. This
was the case in the majority of adverts for home products, for food products and
also for beauty products. Dyer concludes from this that the treatment of women in
adverts amounts to what Tuchman (1981) has described as the ‘symbolic annihilation’
of women. In other words, adverts reflect the dominant belief that ‘women are not
important, except in the home, and even there, men know best’, as the male voice-over
suggests (Dyer, 1982, p. 109).
These findings can be compared with those of a more recent study carried out by
Cumberbatch (1990) for the Broadcasting Standards Council in the UK. This study
found that there were twice as many men as women in adverts, by far the majority (89
per cent) of which used male voice-overs even when the advert predominantly featured
a woman. Women in adverts were younger and more physically attractive than the
men. Men were twice as likely to be depicted in paid employment as women, and
work was shown as being crucial to men’s lives whereas relationships were shown
to be more important for women, even those at work. Only 7 per cent of adverts
studied showed women doing housework, but women were twice as likely as men to
be shown washing up or cleaning. Men were more likely than women to be shown

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cooking for a special occasion or where special skills were seen to be necessary.
Women were more likely than men to be shown doing ‘everyday’ cooking. Women
were twice as likely to be depicted as married, and as receiving sexual advances
(though usually not in the same advert!) as men.
Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Myra Macdonald (1995) in her
book Representing Women has identified three constructions of feminine identity that,
she argues, dominated advertising discourse throughout the course of the twentieth
century. These are: the capable household manager, the guilty mother and, more
recently, the new woman – ‘playful, indulgent, sexually aware, and adventurous’ (p. 85).
The latter, she argues, has flattered rather than coerced women into purchasing
consumer goods, particularly beauty products. In the advertising discourse of the ‘New
Woman’, Macdonald identifies three forms of co-option of feminist ideas and ideology
that, she argues, emerged in consumer discourses in the 1980s and 1990s. These are:
the appropriation of quasi-feminist concepts; the redrafting of caring to make it
compatible with self-fulfilment, and the acknowledgement of female fantasies.
Feminist studies have suggested, then, that there has been a shift in the construc-
tion of gender in adverts in recent years, a shift that requires a more in-depth treatment
than content analysis of stereotypical representations allows for. Some feminists
have pointed out that the most marked transition in the representation of women
has been from the portrayal of the domestically oriented woman to a woman who
seeks to please herself (see in particular adverts for beauty and hair products). This
has led some commentators such as Macdonald (1995) and also Goldman (1992) to
argue that a ‘new woman’ has emerged in advertising in recent years. She is generally
presented as a ‘Superwoman’ – a woman who manages to be successful in her career,
to have a clean and shiny home, to be a good mother and wife, to produce delicious
home-cooked meals and, of course, to be sexually attractive, and so on. In seeking
to explain the emergence of Superwomen in advertising, Goldman (and others) have
focused not on the content of the adverts themselves, but on their broader social
context. Goldman for instance argues that advertisers, forced to recognise the greater
participation of women in the labour force, as well as changes in gender relations,
began to exploit this new market and target a specific type of consumer, the ‘career
woman’. Hence, in Goldman’s view, marketing strategies sought to co-opt and com-
modify the very notion of women’s liberation. Goldman’s account emphasises, then,
that advertisers sought to incorporate feminist ideas and thereby remove their critical
power with respect to advertising.
Drawing on semiology and also a Marxist theory of consumption, Goldman
describes this co-option of feminism as ‘commodity feminism’ (playing on the Marxist
conception of ‘commodity fetishism’ – the idea that commodity relations turn the
relations of acting subjects into relations between objects). This means that, from
the point of view of advertisers, feminism is not so much a social movement with
a particular politics and ideology that might threaten to undermine the power of
advertising, but rather a ‘style’ that can be achieved by consuming particular products.
Feminism then is redefined and re-packaged so that certain objects are professed
to signify a feminist lifestyle. Feminists are therefore constructed, Goldman argues,
as just another consumer category amongst many others. In advertising, feminism is
supposedly signified by assembling a range of signs which connote independence,

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participation in paid work, individual freedom and self-control. In ‘commodity feminist’

adverts, Goldman suggests, women are depicted not as needing a man to be complete,
but rather a particular product. The implication is that social change occurs not through
protest, strikes or challenges to the legal system (see Chapter 11), but through indi-
vidualised commodity consumption. Hence, this particular aspect of consumer culture
has often been associated with post-feminism (see Chapter 2).
In sum, feminists have pointed out that content analyses of advertising have
been useful to the extent that they can give us a description of the sexism inherent in
much advertising, and of the extent to which the range of roles on offer to women
in advertising has remained surprisingly stagnant (Macdonald, 1995). But content
analysis cannot explain where these images come from in the first instance. Nor
can it account for sex-role stereotyping, and why this might change alongside other
social changes – in women’s political and economic circumstances, for instance.
Content analysis cannot account, for example, for why traditional images of women
in advertising have apparently evolved into more ‘liberated’ or ‘ironic’ portrayals. Gill
(1988) has argued, for instance, that an advert which used a demand raised by femi-
nists in abortion campaigns, ‘a woman’s right to choose’, as a slogan for a holiday
for young people, would have been judged to be ‘feminist’ on the basis of a study
merely of its content. A content analysis approach would have registered words such
as ‘freedom’ or ‘rights’ or ‘express herself’ as affirmative of feminist ideas. Hence, more
recent analyses have drawn on concepts derived from Marxism and also from
semiology to argue that advertisements are made to mean something as a result of the
ways in which the ideologies contained within them resonate with their broader social
context.

Women’s magazines

Feminists who have studied women’s magazines have adopted a more qualitative
approach than merely counting types of images and, in short, have placed their
analyses of the content of magazines within a broader critique of patriarchal society.
Such magazines have a long history. Indeed Janice Winship (1987) has argued
that women’s magazines provide an unparalleled popular or mass documentation of
women’s changing roles and lifestyles.
Historically, women’s magazines have had a domestic focus. This is reflected for
instance in titles in the UK such as Woman and Home and Good Housekeeping. Whilst
in the nineteenth century, publications such as these addressed women as an un-
differentiated mass, increasingly the category ‘woman’ has been fractured into a more
complex collection of status categories as the market has expanded throughout
particularly the latter part of the twentieth century. That is, more individual types of
women are constructed by these magazine titles. Hence, several titles see the female
subject as caught up in traditional arenas such as the family and marriage, as signified
by the abundance of magazines on weddings and parenting, for instance. A range of
specialist magazines is also devoted to particular themes such as fashion and dieting.
At the same time, however, the more general category of ‘lifestyle’ magazines has
expanded considerably, evolving for instance into a burgeoning teenage market. As

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Lisa Duke and Peggy Kreshel (1998) emphasise in their research on young women
and magazines, these play an important role in reinforcing patriarchal standards of
femininity (see also Winship, 1987 and McRobbie, 1991, 1994, 1996).
Despite the expansion of women’s magazines and the apparent fracturing of
women’s roles and identities, feminist studies have emphasised that particular themes
remain relatively constant in the ways in which women are constructed and portrayed.
Writing in the 1980s, Janice Winship (1987), for instance, suggested that themes of
domestic work and beauty, as well as personal relationships, dominated women’s
magazines throughout the course of the twentieth century. Across a range of magazine
genres, Winship argues, women have been defined as emotional workers in the realm
of relationships with men, children, family and friends. Thus readers tend to be
addressed as wives, mothers and as emotional workers more generally.
More recently magazines such as New Woman and She, as feminists such as Ien
Ang (1989) have pointed out, have tended to draw on feminist repertoires in empha-
sising women’s independence. However, Ang argues that in doing so they have
failed to take account of feminist diversity and therefore tend to exclude all but the most
affluent, urban, white, middle-class women. In particular, contradictory fantasies such
as being an ‘independent mother’ are presented; yet, she points out, rarely are issues
such as how to be ‘independent’ with ‘dependent’ children addressed.
The relationship between patriarchal ideology, social change and women’s maga-
zines has been considered by Glasser (1997) in her research on women’s magazine
fiction in China before and after the implementation of the Four Modernisation Policies
in the late 1970s. Her study focuses on the relationship between representations
of women and the shifting ideological landscape, revealing an important irony. As
China moves towards relative political openness and economic modernisation,
traditional stereotypes of women as homemakers and caregivers increasingly re-
emerge. Glasser argues that such representations have to be interpreted contextually.
The image of the public-minded model worker in the 1960s masked a ‘repression of
personal aspiration in the name of the collective’ so that ‘the image of the family
orientated homemaker, mother, or nurturer from the late 1970s onward, is a dialectic
response to the re-emphasis of personal desires’ (p. 85).

Women and soap operas

As we noted above, feminist content analyses initially sought to demonstrate that media
representations of women were unrealistic. In her work on women in soap operas,
Christine Geraghty (1996) pointed out a number of problems with this approach. First,
she argued, it implied that an important function of the media is to make ‘realistic’
representations. Second, it suggested that representations should therefore more
accurately reflect what women are ‘really’ like. Third, it implied that accurate repre-
sentations are important to those being represented, because media representations
affect how men and women see themselves, and how others see them. However,
Geraghty and others have argued that this emphasis on the need for realism fails to
recognise the socially constructed nature of reality. As Macdonald (1995) has pointed
out, such an approach assumes that reality is directly ‘knowable’ and accessible,

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unfiltered by our own perceptions and beliefs, and is capable of being presented in
an unadulterated, unmediated form.
More social constructionist feminist studies of media and cultural forms turned
their attention to programmes such as soap operas and narrative forms such as
romantic fiction with a view to examining the way in which they actually constituted
femininity, rather than simply represented ‘real’ women’s lives, accurately or otherwise.
Crucially, they looked at why women might enjoy them, focusing on what they offered
women. To elaborate, this focus on the pleasure and the cultural forms mainly
consumed by women was a clear reaction to the ideas of the Frankfurt School
considered above, and, particularly, their denigration of such media forms as examples
of ‘mass’ as opposed to ‘high’ culture, and therefore of no value. Feminists objected
to this, arguing that it was an outcome of the masculinist bias by which men were
associated with ‘high’ cultural forms and women with ‘mass’ culture; with emotion,
passivity and consumption. As Tania Modleski (1982) has pointed out, it was these
categorisations and the hierarchy they implied that needed to be challenged, not
the pleasure women derived from engaging with particular cultural forms that
were different from those associated with (and valued by) men. In her view, the terms
in which such cultural forms were assessed were derived from, and refer back
to, patriarchal ideology. They merely evaluate the masculine at the expense of the
feminine.
Focusing specifically on the 1980s US soap opera Dallas, Ien Ang (1989) suggests
that despite surface glamour and its distance from the everyday life of viewers, women
still identified with the emotional problems of the main female characters (in particular
Sue Ellen). Indeed, Dallas allowed for the expression of emotions in a more direct and
forceful way than the restrictions of realism allowed.
Similarly, Geraghty (1996) points out that soap operas portrayed women as wives,
mothers, daughters and girlfriends and that many of the stories revolved around
the emotional problems generated by these relationships. What was important,
however, and what gave women viewers pleasure was the care and intensity with
which the problems in these relationships were played out, and the value they gave
to women’s roles in maintaining them. Hence, Geraghty argues, they rendered visible
women’s emotional work in a way not previously acknowledged in malestream cultural
forms. Soap operas therefore gave women a space in which emotional relationships
could be discussed in terms of gender and power, and the subordinated position of
women could be acknowledged, and discussed, by women viewers.
A similar point has been made by Modleski (1982) in her book Loving with a
Vengeance. She suggests that soap operas allow for the representation of strong and
transgressive women. The fact that they are often punished and/or contained within
the home does not, she insists, detract from the importance of their articulation of
anger, ambition and contempt for those who try to control them. Soaps therefore allow
viewers to recognise not so much real (individual) women, but the reality of women’s
(collective) social position. This puts them potentially in a position in which they
can begin to recognise and hence resist male domination, and oppressive modes of
representation, Modleski argues.
Feminist work on soap operas therefore opened up sociological analysis of media
presentations, by drawing attention to the otherwise neglected theme of the pleasures

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women derive from mass culture. It drew attention to the constructions of masculinity
and femininity which frame the ways in which we make sense of media representations.
This was assisted by developments in semiotics which challenged the notion that
meanings were transparent and argued instead that we need to examine how mean-
ings are signified; how things are made to mean. Work on soap operas also showed
that media products were not simply imposed on women but were part of popular
culture; feminists claimed them from ‘below’ because they could support women’s
resistance to male domination, or at least provide women with a common ground on
which to discuss their position. The meaning and importance of media products can
lie with the audience, this research emphasised, not merely with the producers of
representations.

Reading romantic fiction

In a similar vein to her analysis of soap operas, Modleski (1982) refused to see romantic
fiction as some form of ideological manipulation. Instead, she suggested that reading
romantic fiction is a way of exploring contradictions – in the cultural representations
of femininity and the family, and women’s experiences of domestic labour in the home,
for instance. The very impossibility of becoming a romantic heroine experienced in
each reading of a romantic novel, Modleski argues, is a way of negotiating identity and
the tensions between aspiration and reality.
In her book Female Desire, Ros Coward (1984) similarly explored a range of cultural
forms concerned with ‘feminine’ pleasures and pursuits – horoscopes, soap operas,
cooking programmes, fashion, popular music, women’s magazines and also roman-
tic fiction. In particular, she writes about the material not from the perspective of a
‘distant critic’ but from the standpoint of her own pleasure and guilt about enjoying
these particular cultural forms. A similar tone characterises Janice Winship’s (1987,
p. xiii) Inside Women’s Magazines in which she confesses to being a ‘closet’ reader.
Coward’s (like Winship’s) is an approach therefore that is in marked contrast to say
Adorno’s critique of the culture industry in that mass and popular forms of culture are
not denigrated from a ‘great height’ as the disappointing culture of others. Rather,
Coward writes about magazines, soap operas and romantic fiction as ‘our’ (women’s)
culture.
In particular, she explores the cultural representations of women in romantic
fiction not as limiting stereotypes that are imposed on women, but as promoting
pleasure and desire. According to Coward, media representations of women produce
and sustain particular feminine positions or subjectivities. They inform how we see
ourselves and represent ourselves to each other. She points out that, ironically, the
growth of feminism has been paralleled by an increase in the popularity of romance
novels; and it is this she seeks to explain. Coward suggests that romantic fiction is
popular because it satisfies some basic need in women; it offers evidence of and
contributes to a powerful fantasy that promises women safety and security, rather than
oppression and exploitation.
Coward’s analysis is echoed by Janice Radway’s (1987) study of romantic fiction,
Reading the Romance. Radway interviewed 42 readers of romantic novels and asked

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them how they selected and rejected certain titles. According to her readers, the ideal
romance is one in which the intelligent, independent heroine, with a good sense of
humour, is overwhelmed by the love of an intelligent, tender, good humoured man but
only after much distrust and some cruelty has been overcome. The man is transformed
during the relationship from an emotional pre-literate to someone who can care for
her and nurture her. She suggests therefore that romantic fiction expresses not the
desire for a uniquely interesting partner, but the wish to be cared for. It is a ‘fantasy of
reciprocation’, Radway argued, that sustains women’s interest in romantic fiction,
involving the wish to believe that men can bestow on women the care and attention
women are expected regularly to bestow on men.
In her view, the romantic fantasy offers more than this; it recalls a time when
the reader was the recipient of intense maternal care. Drawing on the work of Nancy
Chodorow (see Tong, 1998), Radway argued that romantic fantasy is a form of
regression in which the reader is transported to a time when she was the centre of her
mother’s attention. Romance reading is a means by which women can experience the
emotional security they are expected to provide to others without adequate recipro-
cation. In a somewhat essentialist vein, Radway argues that in order to experience
regressive emotional fulfilment, women have three options: lesbianism, a relationship
with a man or to seek fulfilment by other means. Homophobia and the nature of
masculinity mitigate against the first two, so that romance reading might be an example
of women pursuing the third option, she argues. The resolution to the ideal romance
provides perfect triangular satisfaction, Radway concludes: paternal protection,
maternal care and passionate adult love.
Radway also looked at the act of reading itself and found that this was both
important and pleasurable to women because it offered them a means of escape in
two senses. First, reading was a way of claiming time for themselves away from the
demands of family and domesticity; for the women in her research, time spent reading
was a gift to themselves. Second, it contributed to the emotional reproduction of
women themselves; it helped to sustain them emotionally. Although the experience
(as outlined above) was vicarious, the pleasure it induced was nonetheless real. Thus
Radway’s research led her to make two (apparently contradictory) conclusions. On
the one hand, reading romantic fiction could be seen as an act of resistance by women,
in so far as it allowed them to refuse (albeit momentarily) their self-sacrificing role as
caregivers. But, if the focus was on the text itself, on the content rather than the context
of romantic fiction, Radway’s research emphasises the ways in which women find
pleasure in patriarchal ideologies, for as she concludes, romantic fiction often implies
that male indifference or violence are really expressions of love, or of the ‘nature’ of
masculinity, merely waiting to be decoded by the right woman.

Masculinity and media culture

Until relatively recently, men appear to have paid little attention to their status as
men; masculinity is something that most men take for granted, but do not find easy
to articulate, feminists have argued. As we noted in Chapter 1, a burgeoning literature
that has now come to be associated with Men’s Studies has begun to reflect on the

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meaning of masculinity. In the main, this has been a consequence of three sets of
factors. First, feminists have put relations between men and women on the political
agenda and have argued that sexual difference (the difference between men and women
as social subjects – see Chapters 1 and 2) is socially constructed. Feminist theories
of patriarchy in effect ‘problematised’ masculinity and have been relatively success-
ful (in Western cultures at least) in requiring men to reflect on their role in maintaining
women’s oppression. Second, broad social changes such as structural reconfiguration
involving, particularly, the expansion of the service sector in many societies has
resulted in increasingly large numbers of women entering the labour force (see Chapter
9) and in the contraction of many areas of traditional male employment. This,
combined with the changing nature of family life (see Chapter 6) has resulted in
what some sociologists have described as a ‘crisis of masculinity’ requiring some
degree of reflection on the changing nature of what it means to be a man (see Connell,
1995, 2002). Third, activities by the gay rights movement have challenged a con-
ventional understanding of what it means to be a ‘real’ man, and of what counts
as socially acceptable expressions of masculinity. Hence, there is now a wealth
of literature from diverse disciplines and media that takes masculinity as its object of
interest.
Some of the earliest considerations of masculinity associated with Men’s Studies,
however, tended to replicate hegemonic conceptions and to provide relatively unitary
or one-dimensional views of men and masculinity. As Frank Mort (1988) has pointed
out, in much of the early sociological work on male youth subcultures, referred to
above, a relatively coherent and homogenous image of young working-class men was
presented.
Recent work has insisted that masculinity is socially constructed, and varies
over time and place, emphasising that various versions of masculinity can coexist.
These approaches have highlighted changing modes of masculinity, and the diverse
ways in which masculinity is constructed in a range of cultural forms such as film,
magazines and advertising. They have also highlighted the role of the media in shaping
the relationship between masculinity and other aspects of identity such as sexuality,
race and ethnicity. Julien and Mercer (1988) have drawn attention to the ways in which
media images are both racist and ethnocentric in their construction of Black and Asian
masculinities, for instance, by arguing that

As black men we are implicated in the same landscape of stereotypes which is

dominated and organized around the needs, demands and desires of white males.
Blacks ‘fit’ into this terrain by being confined to a narrow repertoire of ‘types’ –
the supersexual stud and the sexual ‘savage’ on the one hand or the delicate,
fragile and exotic ‘oriental’ on the other. . . . The hegemonic repertoire of images
of black masculinity, from docile ‘Uncle Tom’, the shuffling minstrel entertainer,
the threatening native to ‘Superspade’ figures like Shaft, has been forged in and
through the histories of slavery, colonialism and imperialism . . . a central strand
in this history is the way black men have incorporated a code of ‘macho’ behaviour
in order to recuperate some degree of power over the condition of powerlessness
and dependency in relation to the white slave-master.
(Julien and Mercer, 1988, pp. 133–136)

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Rutherford (in Chapman and Rutherford, 1988) suggested that one of the main
recurring images of masculinity in films of the 1980s, and which is still in evidence in
Hollywood cinema today, is what he calls ‘Retributive Man’. In his view, the classic
figure here is Rambo. Retributive Man represents the struggle to assert what might be
described as traditional masculinity – a tough, independent authority – and has entered
popular culture as an enduring myth. What this image implies is that a destructive and
forceful machismo is the solution to men’s (and society’s) problems. According to
Rutherford, this figure is also epitomised by John Wayne, wildly lashing out at every-
thing that threatens him. He confronts a world full of traitors, cowards and ‘feminised
men’ in which he has only himself to rely on. Rutherford emphasises that many of
the images of masculinity in the ‘action hero’ films of the 1980s sat comfortably
alongside Thatcherite ideology in Britain that emphasised values of individualism and
heroism.
A similar approach to Rutherford’s can be seen in work by Susan Jefford (1994)
in the USA, in her book Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. Here she
makes links between cinematic representations of ‘hard bodies’ and the prevailing
ideologies of the Reagan administration. In brief, she maintains that after the Vietnam
War and the resignation of Nixon, the US experienced a crisis of purpose, followed
by a period of malaise and uncertainty. The perceived weakness came to an end
at the advent of the Reagan era, and a cinematic culture dominated by action films
featuring tough, aggressive masculinities began to prevail. Rutherford argues that such
films reflected shared presuppositions about what a ‘man’ and a ‘state’ should be like
– assertive, tough and, when necessary, violent; in short, a ‘hard body’.
Frank Mort (1988) and others have argued that this type of film waned in
popularity in the 1990s because of the evolution of a new male identity, the ‘New Man’.
As Mort argued, this discourse of masculinity emerged from the late 1980s onwards
and occurred repeatedly in a range of media forms, but particularly in film and
advertising. The rise of the so-called New Man, he suggests, coincided with develop-
ments in consumerism and advertising and (as we noted above) broader social and
demographic changes in the labour market, the family and the household. In devel-
oping the New Man as a new market, advertisers were greatly assisted, Mort notes,
by the burgeoning ‘style press’ (see also Nixon, 1996), and particularly the launch of
men’s lifestyle magazines. These magazines provided new but socially acceptable
images of masculinity, focusing on fashion through the lenses of work and travel or
music, for instance, and hence made it easier to target men as consumers.
As Chapman (1988) pointed out, consumer culture was instrumental in ‘feminising’
men. The New Man was constructed as family-oriented and was linked to more
progressive and nurturing versions of fatherhood and emotional expression. Chapman
wryly described the New Man thus:

If the old man was characterized by his abhorrence of all things female, the new
man was invigorated by his enthusiastic embrace of female roles and qualities. He
knew his Borsch from his Brioche, he could dangle junior on his knee while
discussing the internecine convolutions of ‘our relationship’. Tough but tender, he
knew his way ’round a futon and could do more than just spell clitoris. Not for him
the wham-bam-thank-you-man thrust of the quick fuck. He was all cuddles and

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protracted arousal, post-penis man incarnate, the doyen of non-penetrative sex.

He abandoned a lifetime’s belief in the myth of the loo fairy, did his share of the
household chores, ironed tramlines in his own shirts, and could rustle up a chicken
chasseur, with an extra portion for that ‘surprise’ guest, when ‘she’ brought the Boss
home.
(Chapman, 1988, pp. 227–228)

The New Man, however, is not merely the caring-sharing man; he is also a sex
object. In other words, codes of narcissism have been added to those of nurturing,
Chapman goes on to argue. In advertising campaigns such as those for Levi’s 501s,
and in posters produced by the Athena chain (referred to above), the male body is
sexualised and commodified. According to Mort (1996), these male bodies openly
invite a desiring look from women or other men. This eroticisation of the male body
in magazines, fashion photography, advertisements, and so on has meant, he argues,
that men have been able to articulate their sexuality and identity in ways which would
have been impossible twenty years ago. Thus, masculinity is now defined, he argues,
not by a single dominant message but by a self-conscious assemblage of styles.
Perhaps, somewhat ironically, evidence for this latter point might also include a
reaction against the trend towards more egalitarian, feminine modes of masculinity,
namely the contemporary figure of the Lad. So-called ‘Lad culture’ has seemingly
rejected and reacted against liberal sexual politics, and has retreated in chauvinism and
male social exclusivity. In contrast to the New Man, Lad culture involves a display of
masculinity, in media and popular culture, that supposedly involves a parody of sexism.
In Loaded magazine (launched in Britain in 1994) and in TV series such as Men Behaving
Badly and Fantasy Football stereotypes of masculinity are presented, and male pastimes
such as drinking, watching football (see King, 1997) and regarding women as sex
objects dominate in a supposedly ironic, ‘knowing’ way (Loaded’s masthead is ‘for
the man who knows better’). Much of the humour that shapes this culture relates to
reclaiming, in a supposedly ironic way, language that has traditionally been used
to oppress and objectify women, and hence, it is a culture with which most contem-
porary feminists have a particularly problematic relationship. This is not least because
one of the central concerns of feminist politics has been to highlight the significance
of language both in perpetuating, and in challenging, gender oppression.

Feminist perspectives on language

Sociologists often make a distinction between cultural practices (fashion, dance, and
so on) and cultural representations (media images of ‘new men’, for instance).
Language, however (and particularly feminist work on the relationship between gender,
language and power), highlights that this distinction is somewhat problematic because
language is both a cultural practice and a representation. Think of when a couple are
pronounced ‘man and wife’ in a heterosexual marriage ceremony – this is both a
representation (of gender relations in language) and a practice (that takes places
through language).
Language has been of particular significance to feminist theory and politics, not
least because what Deborah Cameron (1998) describes as ‘the power to name and

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define’ can be understood in two ways. First, it can refer to the power of dominant
groups (men, the middle- and upper-classes, white people, Western cultures, able-
bodied people, and so on) to name and define reality for everyone else. But it can also
refer, second, to the capacity of marginalised and oppressed groups to rename and
redefine their own realities. As she puts it,

Since our lives and relationships are carried on to a large extent through language,
since our knowledge of the world is mediated through language, the power to
name and define is an important arena for reproducing or challenging oppressive
social relations.
(Cameron, 1998, p. 148)

Robin Lackoff (1975), in her book Language and Women’s Place, was one of the first
to explore gender and language from a feminist perspective. She argued that women
often lack authority and seriousness, conviction and confidence in their use of lan-
guage. Men, she argued, are more forceful and effective in using language, and tend
to speak more purposefully than women. Women, by contrast, are more tentative,
hesitant and are therefore ‘deficient’ as she described it, in their use of language.
Crucially, she argued this is not because of biological sex differences; women are not
innately deficient in their speech patterns, she emphasised. Rather, it is an outcome of
gender socialisation; of gender roles and power relations rather than some essential
deficiency in women.
Although Lackoff’s was an influential study, it was constrained by what Dale
Spender (1990) has described as its ‘sexist assumptions about speech roles’. Spender
argues that Lackoff takes male language use as the norm and identifies women’s
speech, by definition, as a deviation from that norm. Spender points out that ‘in a
society where women are devalued, it is not surprising that their language should
be devalued’ (1990, p. 10). She argues that the problem is not that women don’t speak
like men, but that women’s ways of communicating are devalued, because women
themselves are devalued and because language is essentially ‘man-made’.

Language as ‘man-made’

Perhaps the most important contribution to the analysis of gender and language has
been made by Dale Spender (1990), who argued that ‘the English language has been
literally man made and . . . is still primarily under male control’ (p. 12). Her account
emphasised that language supports patriarchy and is inherently sexist because
both semantics (the meaning of words) and also syntax (sentence structure, or the form
in which meanings are expressed) are male dominated. Both aspects of language, she
argued, are patriarchal in so far as they are biased in favour of men.
Spender identifies three main ways in which language is male dominated. These
are:

1 linguistic sexism (including androcentrism in syntax and the semantic derogation of

women);

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2 the male line (women’s and children’s adoption of men’s surnames); and
3 gender differences in speech patterns.

What she calls linguistic sexism operates on two levels. Androcentrism in syntax involves
the use of ‘man’ as a generic term and ‘he’ as a universal pronoun to refer both to men
and women. Spender argues that there are more words for men and masculine things
in most languages. (In romantic European languages particularly, in which nouns are
masculine or feminine, there tend to be more masculine words.) She also points out
that generic terms often require a deviation when applied specifically to women (e.g.
chairwoman, stewardess, waitress, mayoress, and so on). This, she argues, reinforces
the male version as the norm.
Deborah Cameron (1995) developed this idea of linguistic sexism and of andro-
centrism in syntax by arguing that gender divisions are not merely ‘lexicalised’
(encoded in words) but are also ‘grammaticised’, that is ‘built into the rules for
constructing well-formed sentences’ (p. 151). This often involves giving words and
phrases with masculine connotations priority within the construction of sentences,
she argues.
In her discussion of linguistic sexism, Spender (1990) also notes that language
tends to be structured around a series of dualisms and that there are more negative
words for women (especially those with sexual connotations), yet there is no linguistic
reason why this should be the case. In contrast, words associated with men and
masculinity tend to be more positive in their associations. She terms this the semantic
derogation of women, and illustrates this point with reference to the ways in which
words used to designate the same condition have different (positive and negative)
connotations for men and women. Compare the terms ‘stud’ and ‘slag’ for instance;
both refer to sexually active males and females, respectively, but the former is almost
complimentary whereas the latter is particularly derogatory (see Lees, 1986, 1993).
A similar point could be made about the terms ‘bachelor’ and ‘spinster’, and a whole
range of gendered oppositions in language that serve to position women negatively
relative to men and to limit the ways in which women, especially, perform gender.
The same words applied to women often have different (frequently negative) asso-
ciations – e.g. ‘she’s a tramp’ has a sexual connotation that tends not to apply when
the same term is used to describe a man. Rosemary Pringle developed this latter point
in her book Secretaries Talk in which she argued that

It is no more possible to label [heterosexual] men bitches than it is to label them

sluts or tarts – though, of course, gay men have appropriated all three terms.
It may be acknowledged that ‘men bitch too’, and we do not have to look very
far to find men indulging in manipulation, back-stabbing, whingeing and gossiping.
But the term is not easily applied to them. This disguises the extent to which
men do bitch and, perhaps more significantly, the extent to which they are bitched
about. The apparent absence of men from the bitching discourse facilitates the
presentation of masculinity as rational, abstract and autonomous; women by
contrast are locked into the petty and the concrete.
(Pringle, 1989, p. 235)

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Second, Spender (1990) argues that the use of surnames is male dominated in
what she calls the male line and that a surname functions as a signifier of patriarchy,
which often makes it difficult to trace women’s genealogies. It also reinforces the
idea that women are men’s property, particularly in the use of formal titles such as
Mrs John Smith, presenting a married woman as a female variant of her husband, and
not as a person in her own right.
Similar to Lackoff, Spender also emphasises gender differences in speech patterns,
noting gender differences in access to, and in the use of, language as a form of cultural
expression. She argues that women tend to be more tentative in their use of speech,
as a consequence of their subordinate social status, and tend to be relatively silent,
particularly in public or in mixed sex groups. Research (see David Graddol and Joan
Swann’s Gender Voices, 1989) has found that men tend to dominate mixed sex
conversation in several ways:

1 they tend to set the agenda (determine the topic and its development);
2 they tend to speak more, and to speak louder than women;
3 they tend to interrupt and contradict more than women; and
4 they tend to close conversations more so than women do.

Spender argues that mainstream linguistic research has often served to reinforce
these gender differences by implying that men’s use of language is more ‘serious’ than
women’s (that women ‘chatter’ and ‘gossip’ – using derogatory terms for women’s
ways of speaking) and perpetuating the idea that women’s voices are too high pitched
to listen to for any length of time, or to be taken seriously (hence, until recently,
relatively few women were employed as newsreaders or hosts of current affairs
programmes).
Deborah Cameron (1990) develops this approach in her book The Feminist Critique
of Language, as well as in more recent work (Cameron, 1995), arguing that women
are ‘silenced’ and excluded from dominant forms of language use, especially in the
public sphere, and in formal contexts such as meetings. As we noted in Chapter 8,
research on language use amongst young women with reference to their apparent
reluctance to articulate their own sexual desires and expectations (around condom
use, for instance), has similarly highlighted a ‘gendered division of linguistic labour’ that
serves to entrap young people into the gendered language of heterosexuality and to
reinforce women’s responsibility for the emotional aspects of sexual relationships
(Holland et al., 1998).

Feminist criticisms of man-made language

Not all feminists are convinced by Spender’s argument that language is man-made,
however, and her analysis has been subject to two main criticisms. First, it suggests
that language is a fixed rather than evolving system. Second, and related to this, it
makes language users sound passive rather than actively engaged in the production,
dissemination and consumption of language.
Janet Holmes (1997) is one such commentator, who argues that whilst language
can be oppressive, it can also be an important mechanism for challenging oppression.

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Her analysis emphasises that groups of people who are marginalised, in part at least,
in and through language can reappropriate derogatory terms, and that the relationship
between language and power is more complex and contested than Spender suggests.
Holmes argues that not only does the argument that language is ‘man-made’ privilege
(and also homogenise) women over other groups who are subject to ‘linguistic
oppression’, but also underestimates the critical potential of language to challenge
and undermine established power relations. Holmes cites women’s use of the term ‘girl’
as an example of the ways in which language can be reclaimed. As Russell and Tyler
(2002) have recently noted, ‘The term “girl” is clearly a marker of status, denoting both
a positioning within childhood but also a relatively passive designation within a gender
hierarchy; one that the . . . theme of “girl power” attempted to re-articulate’ (p. 620).

Gender and the linguistic turn

Developing this perspective further, and following the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in
the social sciences (see Chapter 2), some feminists (particularly those influenced by
poststructuralism) have recently highlighted the ways in which language does not
simply reflect a pre-existing social reality but actively constructs that reality. This
approach is premised on the assumption that, as sociologist Stuart Hall has put it, the
very concept of

identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we might think. Perhaps instead

of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which cultural practices
then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’, which is
never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside
representation.
(Hall, 1990, p. 222)

Hence, gender is understood to be shaped not just by social structures but by dominant
discourses – forms of language that construct what it means to be a man or a woman.
Feminists who adopt this perspective emphasise that, in their engagement with
dominant discourses, men and women actively reconstruct gender relations in a way
that enables male power to be perpetuated. This means that men and women subject
themselves and each other to what, paraphrasing Foucault, might be understood as
a form of gender surveillance – subjecting each other to forms of discipline and control,
particularly in terms of patriarchal norms on feminine appearance, for instance. As
Sandra Lee Bartky (1990, p. 72) has put it in this respect: ‘In contemporary patriarchal
culture a pan-optical [all seeing] male connoisseur resides within the consciousness
of most women; they stand perpetually, before his gaze and under his judgement.’
Echoing earlier work by Mulvey (considered above), feminists such as Bartky have
argued, then, that gendered discourses play a powerful role in controlling and
regulating particularly female behaviour, for example by perpetuating sexual double
standards through discourse. In contrast to Mulvey’s earlier work however, they have
also emphasised that language is the site of contested and negotiated gendered
meanings. One interesting example of this complexity is the gendered culture of cheer-

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leading in the US, in which over 3.5 million girls and young women are thought
to participate (Adams and Bettis, 2003). In their feminist poststructuralist reading of
cheerleading, Adam and Bettis situate cheerleading as ‘a discursive practice that
has changed significantly in the past 150 years or so to accommodate the shifting
and often contradictory meanings of normative femininity’ (p. 73). They argue that
cheerleading is

a gendered activity representing in some ways a liberatory shift in reconstituting

normative femininity, while simultaneously perpetuating a norm of femininity that
does not threaten dominant social values and expectations about the role of girls
and women in society.
(Adam and Bettis, 2003, p. 73)

Other recent studies have emphasised the extent to which various media forms
have begun to incorporate feminist ideas in a more progressive way than its co-option
in advertising imagery considered above. Banet-weiser (2004) has argued, for instance,
that the cable television network Nickelodeon has been recognised by both industry
professionals and media scholars for its representation of girls and young women as
strong, intelligent lead characters. One of the most notable examples of strong female
TV characters in recent years is Buffy the Vampire Slayer who manages to overpower
her enemies, and is often cited by young girls as a positive role model (Russell and
Tyler, 2002). Wilcox and Williams (1996) have also argued that the relationship
between agents Mulder and Scully in The X Files represents a reversal of traditional
gender roles in so far as ‘Scully represents the rationalistic world view usually
associated with men, while Mulder regularly advocates supernatural explanations and
a reliance on intuition usually associated with women’ (p. 99).
The role of the media in challenging and subverting dominant racial ideologies of
gender has also been highlighted, with reference to the role of Bollywood cinema and
new music television, for example (Aftab, 2002; Kumar and Curtin, 2002; Srinivas,
2002). Some feminists have argued that the role of the media in challenging and
inverting traditional gender roles has become even more important given recent
developments in media and communication technologies.

New media technologies and cyberfeminism

The relationship between women and technology, as Liza Tsaliki (2001) notes, has
always been an uneasy one, since the traditional perception of technology is heavily
weighted against women. As she puts it, ‘in many cases, the symbolic representation
of technology reproduces the stereotype of women as technologically ignorant and
inept’ (p. 80). This means that recent developments in media, information and com-
munication technologies are both a challenge and a potential opportunity for feminists.
On the one hand, in increasingly technologically driven and highly IT-skilled societies
there is a considerable risk that women can become further marginalised and
disempowered (the majority of IT graduates and professionals are men, for instance
– see Chapter 9). On the other hand, the evolution of so-called ‘cyberfeminism’

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emphasises the radical potential of what Tsaliki describes as ‘technology as empower-

ment’. Such dilemmas are not entirely new, however. As Myra Macdonald (1995)
points out in her discussion of domestic technology in post-war Britain, developments
such as the advent of automatic washing machines and cookers potentially freed
women from much of the burden of domestic labour (particularly its more physical
aspects) – a theme that dominated advertising discourses at the time. Yet, such devel-
opments also increased (patriarchal and commercial) expectations and, in many
ways, merely served to intensify women’s domestic role (everyday became ‘wash-
day’ for instance). A similar concern about there being no ‘escape’ has characterised
sociological responses to developments in media and communication technologies in
recent years – mobile phones and email, for instance, mean that people are rarely
unobtainable by employers, families and other social networks.
So-called ‘cyberspace’ (the social spaces we inhabit when we go ‘online’ and visit
various web sites, including discussion lists and chat rooms or MUDS – multi-user
domains) is becoming an increasingly important arena for communication between
people who have never met in person. Other forms of communication technology
such as mobile phones and text-messaging have also begun to play an increasingly
significant role in social relations. Some cultural theorists, such as Sadie Plant
(1993), see this as an exciting opportunity for experimentation with gender identities;
with men adopting female personae and vice versa. In her view: ‘Cyberfeminism is
information technology as a fluid attack. . . . Its flows breach the boundaries between
man and machine. . . . Cyberfeminism is simply the acknowledgement that patriarchy
is doomed’ (p. 14).
For Plant, cyberfeminism is a computer culture in which inequalities are eradi-
cated, and traditional gender relations and stereotypes are defied. Others are more
pessimistic, and argue that structural inequalities (not only those between men and
women), transfer from ‘real’ social life into the ‘virtual reality’ we encounter online.
As Tsaliki puts it,

Very often, debates on globalisation, electronic democracy and telematics-based

social networks seem to imply a (utopian) degree of uniformity in social access
to information technology. The truth is, though, that given the ever-increasing
complexity of digital technology, power in cyberspace is based on expertise, and
is available to technologically-adept users – in itself leading towards the creation
of a cyber-elite which is, nevertheless, primarily male-dominated.
(Tsaliki, 2001, p. 88)

By far the majority of ‘traffic’ on the internet is thought to be pornographic,

for instance, and there is some evidence to suggest that women are often subject to
harassment and what has (not unproblematically) been described as ‘cyber-rape’.
As we noted in Chapter 8, it is easy to forget in the discussion of cyberfeminism and
‘cyber-sex’ that internet-based pornography often involves real women whose
participation remains grounded in material inequalities. Clearly, the issues are complex
and evolving. As Mark Poster notes, for instance,

One must admit that the mere fact of communicating under the conditions of
the new technology does not cancel the marks of power constituted under the

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conditions of face-to-face, print and electronic broadcasting modes of intercourse.

Nonetheless, the structural conditions of communicating in Internet communities
do introduce resistances to and breaks with these gender determinations. The
fact of having to decide on one’s gender [for example, participation in MUDs, or
on-line game-playing, often requires the assumption of a character identity with
a ‘username’] itself raises the issue of individual identity in a novel and compelling
manner.
(Poster, 1997, p. 212)

In sum, socio-linguists and feminist sociologists such as Lackoff, Spender and

Cameron have all argued that language not only reflects (represents), but perpetuates
and maintains gender inequalities. Whilst acknowledging that merely changing our
language would not automatically liberate women (and men) from patriarchy, feminists
such as Dale Spender have argued that the coinage of new words and meanings could
be a way of challenging male domination. Other feminists have criticised this approach,
emphasising instead the extent to which language is always negotiated and evolving.
Recent developments in various modes of communication technologies may begin to
facilitate this and, at the very least, heighten our awareness of the relationship between
gender and communication.
The World Bank (cited in Macionis and Plummer, 2002, p. 560) have commented
that ‘the global economy is undergoing an Information Revolution that will be as
significant in its effect as the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century’. Whether
this will be, in part at least, a feminist revolution remains to be seen. Indeed, the full
implications of recent developments in information and communication technologies,
and in global processes of ‘mediatisation’ have yet to become clear. Macionis and
Plummer (2002, p. 565) argue that we need to begin asking ourselves at least three
questions. First, once the full implications of home multimedia start to be realised, will
we spend less and less time in public spaces and in social exchanges (what sociologists
have traditionally thought of as ‘society’), and more and more time in virtual space
(as Baudrillard suggests, we will all move into ‘hyper-reality’)? Second, the media world
seems set to become an increasingly commercialised global one dominated by
huge transnational corporations. Will this mean an increasing McDonaldization of
culture, as Ritzer has argued? Third, the countries with the highest internet accessibility
are overwhelmingly Western and at least 80 per cent of the world’s 200 or so nations
still lack substantial communication technologies. Is this a process that will have serious
consequences for wider global inequalities, and particularly for the world’s women?

Conclusions

Sociologists have emphasised that culture is a central concept of analysis; crucial

to understanding the relationship between the individual and society. One of the
reasons why the term is so difficult to define, however, is its intricate historical
development; and also the way in which it has come to be used in several different ways
by distinct and often incompatible schools of thought within sociology. In the twen-
tieth century, culture came to refer both to ‘high’ culture – to the highest expressions

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of human civilisation in art, literature and music, for instance; as well as to ‘popular’ or
lived culture – the ways of life that bind groups of people together as a community –
and media culture – mass-produced and disseminated by the culture industries.
In studying culture, sociologists have drawn on a range of concepts derived largely
from Marx’s theory of ideology. In particular, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and
Althusser’s analysis of ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISAs) have been central. Critics
of mass culture, associated largely with the Frankfurt School and, more recently,
Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis, have argued that mass culture is culture that is con-
sumed as a product like any other, and that as a result, traditional distinctions in
taste, quality and value are dissolved into a homogenous culture which is passively
consumed by individuals organised into demographic groups by market researchers.
Critics of mass culture such as Adorno and Marcuse have also emphasised that
technological developments in broadcast media have allowed unprecedented access
to individuals, creating ‘false needs’ which are, in turn, satisfied by the products of
the culture industry. The scope for political resistance and change, and the expression
of individual identity are negated by conformist consumer culture.
Others, for example Fiske, have insisted on the resilience of popular culture, and
on the capacity of individuals to ‘read’ dominant cultural forms in a variety of ways
other than those intended by those who produce and disseminate cultural forms. As
Fiske has put it,

Despite the cultural pessimism of the Frankfurt School, despite the power of
ideology to reproduce itself in its subjects, despite the hegemonic force of the
dominant classes, the people still manage to make their own meanings and to
construct their own culture within, and often against, that which the industry
provides for them.
(Fiske, 1987, p. 286)

Feminist debates have tended to parallel this ‘mass culture/production’ versus

‘popular culture/consumption’ split within sociology more generally. Feminist
approaches have drawn attention to the ways in which cultural studies has tended
to exclude, marginalise or denigrate women, and have highlighted the ways in which
media culture misrepresents women, or constructs femininity only according to a
relatively narrow range of roles and identities. Feminists have also highlighted the
relative absence of women in cultural production, as well as the importance of under-
standing the social context within which women both seek and derive pleasure from
consuming a range of mass cultural forms. Feminist sociologists and cultural theorists
have studied a range of media forms, including advertising, film, television (especially
soap operas), romantic fiction, magazines and, most recently, new forms of media and
communication technologies.

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SUMMARY

1 The term culture is central to sociological analysis, although its

meaning has changed historically, and has been contested by different
schools of thought within cultural studies. Sociologists tend to
distinguish between high culture, popular culture and mass culture.
Some sociologists have argued that we now live in a McDonaldized,
‘media culture’.
2 Cultural studies has been largely concerned with the ideological effects
of the mass media, and has drawn variously on Marx’s theory
of ideology, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and Althusser’s struc-
turalism in understanding the role of the mass media. Two of the main
schools of (malestream) thought include the Frankfurt School and
the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).
3 Two main methodologies have dominated sociological analyses of
media culture: content analysis and semiotics.
4 Until relatively recently, most studies of youth subcultures were
concerned primarily with white, male working-class cultures.
5 Feminists have undertaken studies of a range of media forms and have
focused variously on the representation and construction of gender
within these. Feminists have studied advertising, women’s magazines,
soap operas, romantic fiction and also language.
6 While some feminists are excited by the radical potential of
‘cyberfeminism’, others are more cautious.

FURTHER READING

Cameron, D. (ed.) (1998) The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader. Second edition. London:
Routledge. This is an excellent text that incorporates a range of feminist contributions to
understanding the relationship between gender and language. It incorporates ‘classic’
contributions, as well as more contemporary perspectives.
Strinati, D. (1995) An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London: Routledge. This
introductory text covers a range of perspectives central to cultural studies, and reviews a range
of feminist contributions.

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 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Feminist knowledge

A central argument of this book has been that sociology has tended to ignore, distort
or marginalise women and femininity. We have also suggested that this is a result of
the systematic biases and inadequacies in malestream theories, not just an omission
of women from empirical research. Sociology has tended not to ask questions or
do research in areas of concern to women, and frequently women have been excluded
from samples; when they have been included they have tended to be viewed from
a position that sees men and masculinity as the norm. As we pointed out in Chapter
1, malestream sociological theories such as Marxism and functionalism have often
taken for granted, rather than challenged, the view that the biological differences
between men and women are sufficient to explain and justify social divisions and
inequalities. This explains, for instance, the startled response of one feminist writer
when told by a young Sudanese student that she had written a structural functionalist
dissertation on clitoridectomy (Spivak, 1987).
Rather than unproblematically adopting malestream theories and ‘adding gender
on’, feminist sociologists have argued that it is necessary to develop feminist theories:
theories that explain the world from the position of women, and that enable us to con-
ceptualise reality in a way that reflects women’s interests and values, drawing
on women’s own interpretations of their own experiences. In recent decades (and
primarily as a result of these efforts), sociology has begun to take the feminist challenge
seriously and to acknowledge women both as the subjects of sociological research, and
as the bearers of knowledge.
Thus feminist theories criticise the abstraction and over-inclusiveness of male-
generated categories that conceal women’s oppression. Theories should enable us
to make sense of our lives, feminists argue. Furthermore, they should enable us to
relate our experiences to the ways in which the society in which we live is structured.
Individual men may be the agents of oppression, but patriarchal relationships
also exist in the institutions and social practices of society. Feminist theories must also
enable us to understand how we come to see ourselves as individuals – how we come
to accept that a woman’s role is in the home, that women are capable only of certain
jobs, that girls are worse at mathematics and sciences than boys, that only women who
have had and cared for children are fully developed women, and so on. They must
enable us to understand how we become both subjects (housewives, mothers, nurses,
secretaries) and also subject to the idea that it is natural that women should take on
these roles.

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However, it is important to recognise that different women have different

experiences of reality; the way in which they are subordinated varies. Feminist theory
has tended to be developed by white, middle-class women who work in institutions
of higher education. While all women may share a subordinate position, not all women
experience it in the same way; theories developed by white, middle-class, Western
women have been correctly criticised for marginalising the experiences of working-
class and racialised women, or women subject to global power relations, or margin-
alised because of disability or age, and so on. To represent reality adequately from the
standpoints of women, feminist theory must draw on a variety of women’s experiences.
To do this it is necessary to find ways in which all groups of women can participate
in theory-building – to ensure that feminist theories adequately incorporate the
experiences of all women.
As we also noted in Chapter 2, feminist theories are also political: they set out not
just to explain society but to transform it. Feminist theories are concerned to analyse
how women can transform society so that they are no longer subordinated by under-
standing how patriarchal relations control and constrict them. Consequently the
adequacy of feminist theories is tested at least in part by their usefulness, that is
the extent to which they provide useful and usable knowledge for women. Feminist
sociology is concerned, then, to build what Dorothy Smith (1987) has called a sociology
for women – a sociology that relates to women, with which women can identify,
in which women recognise themselves as the subject of what is being said, and which
helps us to understand our everyday lives as well as the ways in which they are
structured and established within a male-dominated society.
A sociology for women would empower women because, as feminists have long
since noted, knowledge is power (see Smith, 2004). Women have inhabited a cultural,
political and intellectual world from whose making they have been excluded and in
which they have often been recognised as of no more than marginal relevance.
Malestream scientific knowledge, including sociology, has been used to justify the
exclusion of women from positions of power and authority in cultural, political and
intellectual institutions. Feminist knowledge, including sociology, challenges the objec-
tivity and truth of that knowledge (which is presented as gender neutral) and seeks
to replace it with more adequate knowledge – more adequate because it arises from
the position of the oppressed and seeks to understand that oppression.
Some radical feminists would argue that we should not seek to develop new,
feminist theories because the theoretical approach is an essentially masculine way
of working. Theorising is seen as a task undertaken by an elite that devalues, or even
ignores, the experiences of women not included in that elite. Feminist sociologists, they
argue, are trying to replace one ‘truth’ with another and in doing so fail to recognise
the validity of the experience of all women. The feminist task, they suggest, is to use
the experiences of all women in making sense of women’s lives and fighting oppression.
However, we would argue that all explanation and research is an essentially
theoretical activity, whether the theory is made explicit or remains implicit. ‘Facts’
– our experiences and our observations – do not speak for themselves; we have to
explain them – that is, to theorise them. Feminist theories have enabled women to do
this – to make sense of their lives and the cultural, political and intellectual worlds that
they inhabit. Experience itself is a product of our theories; we interpret and make sense

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of what is happening in our lives. In the past women have had to use malestream
theories; but as we outlined in Chapter 2, have begun to replace them with a range of
feminist alternatives.
It could be argued that attempts to develop feminist sociology are themselves a
contradiction (in much the same way as it has been argued that a Marxist sociology
is a contradiction): that the Women’s Movement and feminism are themselves con-
cerned with understanding women’s lives and developing strategies that will enable
women to liberate themselves from oppression. Feminists have sought to break down
artificial – man-made – barriers between disciplines and to develop interdisciplinary
studies that recognise that we cannot compartmentalise knowledge or women’s lives
into discrete areas. A Women’s Studies syllabus would include, for example, women’s
literature, women’s art, women’s history and feminist biology as well as feminist social
science. The subjects would not necessarily be taught as disciplines, but as they are
lived. Likewise, feminist theories are not bound by discipline. The theories that we
have used in this book and the epistemological stances which we examine in more
detail in this chapter are not restricted to sociology – they are not sociological theories
and epistemological positions, but feminist ones. Nevertheless, feminists have been
interested in many areas that concern sociologists, and many female sociologists
would regard themselves and the work they do as feminist. Feminists have never
claimed to be scientific observers of the world, however, and would argue that no
knowledge is neutral; malestream knowledge has been used to control women, and
feminist knowledge is an aid to the emancipation of women.

Doing feminist research

Theories are world views that enable us to make sense of the world. They guide us in
terms of what is important and relevant to question and help us to interpret what is
going on. However, to understand the world it is also necessary to collect evidence
– to carry out research. Research methods are the means by which sociologists gather
material about society. The main research methods used in sociology are usually
divided into ‘quantitative’ methods, most notably the survey and the statistical analysis
of secondary-source data; and ethnographic or ‘qualitative’ methods, most notably
participant observation, in-depth interviewing and the qualitative analysis of secondary
sources of data. One could argue that no research method is explicitly feminist or anti-
feminist; it is the ways in which research is carried out and the theoretical framework
within which the results are interpreted that determine if research is feminist or not.
However, many feminists have rejected quantitative methods of data collection and
analysis because they argue these assume a scientific status that sociology cannot and
should not strive to attain, and because they treat people as objects, as natural scientists
treat chemicals or rocks, rather than as human subjects. Indeed, as Porter (1995) has
pointed out, quantitative methods of data collection and analysis, in particular the
survey method, were developed largely as technologies of distance that became
the preferred vehicle for studying social groups such as the insane, the unemployed,
criminals, factory workers and prostitutes (so that a degree of physical and moral
distance could be maintained). However, Ann Oakley (1998) has argued in favour of

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rehabilitating quantitative methodology and integrating a range of methods into a

feminist social science. Her analysis is grounded in the contention that

The case against quantitative ways of knowing is based on a rejection of reason

and science as masculine and an embracing of experience as feminine; but this is
essentialist thinking which buys into the very paradox that it protests about.
(Oakley, 1998, p. 725)

Feminist research has generally been concerned to move away from the
positivistic view of sociology as a science and to argue that research should involve
a commitment to the emancipation of women. While some feminists have suggested
that feminist research should be research by women, for women and with women,
others have argued that it should include both men and women in its ‘subject-matter’,
explicitly recognising and investigating the sex–gender system that exists in the society
being researched.
Harding (1987) has suggested that it is not the method of research that makes
feminist research significantly different from malestream research, but:

1 the alternative origin of problems – raising problems and issues that are of concern
to women rather than to men;
2 the alternative explanatory hypotheses that are developed and the evidence that is
used;
3 the purpose of the enquiry – to facilitate an understanding of women’s views of the
world and to play a role in female emancipation; and
4 the nature of the relationship between the researcher and the ‘subjects’ of her enquiry.

She points to the need to distinguish between methods, methodologies and epis-
temologies. Methods are techniques for gathering evidence. Methodologies are
theories of how research should proceed; they are usually qualitative or quantitative.
Epistemologies define what counts as an adequate theory and how research findings
can be judged: what makes the findings of one piece of research more adequate than
the findings of other research in the same area. The question of epistemology raises
the issue of who the knower (researcher) can be, what tests of belief something must
pass to count as legitimate knowledge, and what class of things can be known.
What is distinctive about feminist research is the methodology and epistemology
that underpins it. However, feminists are not in total agreement; there are competing
theories and arguments about the ways in which feminists should undertake research.
There is, however, some measure of agreement about the reasons for rejecting
malestream research:

1 In the name of science, malestream sociologists have helped to sustain an ideology

that supports the continuing subordination of women.
2 Women, and women’s concerns, have not been seen as a major aspect of the
research project. When women are included in research they are often seen as
marginal and viewed from the perspective of men. There has also been a tendency
to present men and masculinity as the norm, and when women do not conform to
this norm to present them as deviant.

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3 Those who have been researched have been treated as objects to be worked on.
Researchers have also used those studied to serve the researchers’ purposes rather
than to meet the needs and aspirations of the researched. Feminists have referred
to this as the ‘research as rape’ model. Shulamit Reinharz (1983) captures this
criticism well:

conducted on a rape model, the researchers take, hit and run. They intrude into
their subjects’ privacy, disrupt their perceptions, utilise false pretences,
manipulate the relationships, and give little or nothing in return. When the needs
of the researchers are satisfied, they break off contact with the subjects.
(Reinharz, 1983, p. 80)

Feminists are concerned to develop research strategies to incorporate women

and not to treat the researched as objects to be used by the researcher. There are
differences among feminists as to how this is to be done – as to what exactly feminist
research is and how to go about doing it. Initially much feminist scholarship and
research involved a form of deconstruction – that is, it was concerned to expose the
male-centred nature of existing sociological research, and to point out that it ignored
the experiences and perceptions of women. A second stage was research on women
by women. This research asked new questions and was concerned to provide know-
ledge from the perspective of women. It was recognised that it was necessary
to develop theories to provide an understanding of women’s experience. Many
feminists see this as the main objective of feminist research – especially radical
feminists. A third stage has been the development of the argument that feminists can
develop a feminist sociology only if they research men as well as women, but with the
proviso that the research is from a feminist perspective, providing a fuller and more
adequate knowledge.
The logic of the feminist position on research seems to demand non-individual
co-research, where the researcher helps the women involved to undertake their own
research, so that researcher and researched decide together on the object of the
research, how the research is to be conducted and how the findings are to be used. In
practice, few feminists have adopted this method. This is partly because it is not
possible for the researcher to share her knowledge and expertise, and to imply that she
is doing so conceals a power relationship rather than overcoming it. Furthermore,
most researchers are middle-class women with a university education, and many of
those who are researched lack this privileged background. Most feminists have argued,
however, that rather than concealing, exploiting or pretending to overcome this power
relationship, (academic) feminist researchers should use their relatively privileged
background and position in a way that benefits women as a group and not merely
their individual careers. As Alcoff and Potter (1993, p. 14) put it, many feminists argue
that ‘feminist epistemologies must be tested by their effects on the practical political
struggles occurring in a wider frame of reference that the academy’.
As we noted above, many feminists have argued that feminist researchers in
sociology must adopt a qualitative methodology, so that the women (and men) who
are the subjects of research can be ‘heard’ and so that it becomes possible to see and
understand the world from the position of the research subjects. They have also

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rejected the view that feminist researchers can be objective in the sense of being unin-
volved, because as researchers they are part of what is being researched. Involvement
is seen as necessary and inevitable; necessary because the researcher must and does
identify with the women she is researching, and inevitable because she is a part of
what is being researched – she is involved. This means that what sociologists call
‘reflexivity’ is essential – the researcher must be constantly aware of how her values,
attitudes and perceptions influence the research process, from the formulation of the
research questions, through the data-collection stage, to the ways in which the data
are analysed, explained and disseminated.
Clearly a dilemma for feminist researchers is how to balance reflexivity with
representation. Gayle Letherby (2002), in her account of researching the social,
emotional and medical experiences of women who are ‘infertile’ or ‘involuntarily
childless’, argues that feminist research must aim both to represent and interpret the
experiences of respondents, at the same time as theorising and making sense of those
experiences within the context of a broader totality of knowledge and understanding,
not least because (unlike individual respondents), researchers have access not only
to their intellectual knowledge base but also the experiences and reflections of all
respondents involved in the research. On this basis she distinguishes between
‘descriptive reflexivity’ (in which respondents engage) and ‘analytical reflexivity’ (which
is the responsibility of the researcher).
In practice, feminist sociologists have found it difficult to carry out research that
lives up to the demands of the methodology that has been set out above. This is
because of the sheer difficulty of doing research at all, because the training (and
funding) of most female researchers has taken place within malestream assumptions,
because there are inevitably power relationships involved in research, because the
funders of research have certain views about what constitutes ‘good’ research practice,
and because feminist sociologists are part of a wider academic community to which
they have to justify their research practices and findings. Yet, one of the main traps into
which they fall is to take on a neutral stance, so that the research is on women, asks
questions of interest to women and uses qualitative methods, but the researcher tries
to stand back and remain detached from what is going on rather than being a part of
the research process and making explicit her involvement as a woman. In her early
work, Ann Oakley (1982) suggests that she was often aware of how much of a danger
this was when she was interviewing women about the events surrounding maternity
and childbirth – a subject of central interest to the women being researched and to
Oakley herself as a woman and mother. For this reason, she describes interviewing
women as a ‘contradiction in terms’ because the interviews she carried out were more
like conversations than interrogations or ‘scientific’ observations.
Feminist sociologists also frequently use the research findings for publications that
are as much for their career advancement as to help the women (and men) who were
the subjects of research – although, of course, the publication of research findings can
influence policy-makers and social perceptions more generally, and could result in
changes in women’s lives that meet their needs. The danger here is that the researcher
does not have control over how others interpret and use the research findings.
Most feminists would argue against the view that the researcher/scientist is not
responsible for how the findings of research are used, but once research is published

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the researcher effectively loses control. Janet Finch’s research finding (1983) that
working-class mothers find it difficult to organise pre-school playgroups for their
children could as easily be used to argue that this means that they are responsible
for their children not having pre-school education as to argue that the state should
organise and run pre-school facilities for working-class children. This does not mean
that we reject feminist research or that we do not publish our findings. It means that
we have to be constantly aware of the dangers of appearing to be a neutral scientist
and of the ways in which research findings can be distorted by an anti-feminist
interpretation.

Feminist epistemologies

One of the main problems for feminists in sociology is having their research findings
taken seriously. On what basis are their findings better than, more true than, those
of malestream sociologists? Indeed, why should we believe the findings of any soci-
ological research? Truth claims are generally based on a particular epistemological
perspective, that is a theory of what constitutes knowledge and a justification of
particular criteria for discerning between competing truth claims. In the social sciences
the dominant basis for truth claims is that the research was scientific – that is, the
researcher was objective and value-free and followed certain agreed procedures for
carrying out the research – the Scientific Method. This epistemology is generally
referred to as ‘positivism’. Although sociologists other than feminists have been critical
of positivistic social science, feminists have made a significant contribution to under-
standing the connection between power and knowledge. In particular, they have
pointed out that the recognition of knowledge claims is intrinsically tied to relations
of domination and exclusion.
A major problem is that feminist research can be accused of being ‘subjective’ and
therefore of no value. If it is seen as subjective then there is no way of showing how
feminist conclusions are any better than those reached by anyone else, and why the
findings of feminist research are better than those of malestream research and should
be taken seriously. There are a number of feminist epistemological stances which have
been adopted to provide the basis for feminist truth claims. However, we must be
aware, as Liz Stanley and Sue Wise (1993) point out, that:

Marking out the attributes of different although related feminist epistemologies,

such as feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint and postmodernism feminism,
is useful as long as it is recognised that this produces a model, and is thus neces-
sarily a simplified (not a literal/representational) account of the epistemological
possibilities that exist.
(Stanley and Wise, 1993, p. 190)

They go on to argue that feminists typically encompass, in their actual work, elements
of a number of epistemological stances. They suggest (p. 191) that five broad principles
should be adopted in considering feminist epistemologies:

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1 While there is a range of feminist epistemologies, in practice these shade into each
other in people’s research.
2 Different feminist epistemological positions sometimes disagree over the basis of
knowledge, who generates it and under what conditions.
3 Feminist sociologists often combine elements of a number of epistemological
positions within their work, and this indicates not only that we can work within
contradictions, but that either we do not think carefully through the basis of what we
do and what we claim for it, or alternatively that we do think it through but choose
to work with ‘contradictory’ elements because this is what social reality is like.
4 There is no ‘true’ feminist epistemology – each can be seen to be sensible and
plausible given the purposes and project of those who hold it.
5 We can challenge and question other positions, but that we should have mutual
respect for different feminisms and recognise the value of diversity.

Feminist empiricism

A position adopted by many liberal feminists, feminist empiricism is critical of male-

stream research because it has been male-centred. Feminist empiricists suggest that
feminists are more likely to produce adequate knowledge because they include women
and women’s experiences in their research as central and normal rather than as
marginal and deviant. In terms of the accumulation of knowledge, feminist empiricists
are concerned primarily to correct bias in our knowledge of men and women (and
in relations of sexual difference), and do so largely through trying to ensure that our
understanding of the world is more scientific, and thus more accurately reflects what
is believed to be the reality of men’s and women’s lives. This approach is therefore
underpinned by a realist ontology (the belief that there is an external, objective reality)
and the view that the role of research is to produce accurate – scientific – knowledge
of that reality (see Chapter 2).
The logical goal of this perspective is the development of non-sexist research.
Magrit Eichler (1988) has produced guidelines for such research. She argues that non-
sexist research should eliminate:

1 sexism in titles: titles should be explicit (for example, ‘The Affluent Worker’ study
should be retitled ‘The Male Affluent Worker’);
2 sexism in language: language should be used that makes it clear whether men or
women or both are being addressed or referred to;
3 sexist concepts (for example defining class by reference to the occupation of the head
of household);
4 sexism in research designs (so that men and women are both included in the research
where this is relevant);
5 sexism in methods;
6 sexism in data interpretation – the interpretation of data from the perspective just of
men or just of women;
7 sexism in policy evaluation (so that policies that serve the needs of both men and
women are advocated).

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Most feminists would agree with Eichler but argue that what she says is insufficient.
They would reject the positivistic research stance that underlies her preoccupation with
non-sexist methods, arguing that given the power relations that exist in society such
research practices would continue to be male-dominated and meet the needs of men
rather than of women. This is because such research does not challenge the underlying
assumptions inherent in malestream research, which are presented as truths.
The main critique of this approach focuses on the extent to which it leaves estab-
lished values and dualisms intact (the idea that the social world exists independently
of our knowledge of it has been criticised particularly by feminists whose episte-
mological position has been influenced by social constructivism and postmodernism).
These feminists have criticised a continued faith in the ability (or rather viability) of a
neutral scientist (researcher) to represent an objective reality. Feminists have also
criticised a continued faith in the ability of metanarratives such as science to eman-
cipate women, when they have traditionally provided a framework for the production
of knowledge that has served to oppress and marginalise women, and to trivialise
women’s lived experiences. Further, feminist empiricism has been criticised for its
tendency to position human beings as objects of research. Many feminists working
from alternative epistemological perspectives have claimed that this is unethical, and
is counter to the emancipatory principles of feminist research.
In their critique of feminist empiricism, Liz Stanley and Sue Wise (1983) argue
that research carried out in the traditional sociological framework, whether ‘positivistic’
or ‘anti-sexist’, draws on a pre-chosen framework – the findings are abstracted from
reality and presented as if given research logics had been followed. Material is
organised for the reader, and information is not given about what happened, when it
happened, how it happened and how the people involved (including the researchers)
felt about it. They argue that it is essential to recognise that malestream sociological
research is written up as if a formal pattern of procedures were carried out, but that in
practice this is rarely what happens. We would argue that non-sexist research as
advocated by Eichler would fall into the same trap. This type of research account fails
to examine the relationships between experience, consciousness and theory because
it acts as if they are unimportant or do not exist. The researcher is presented as
an objective, neutral and value-free technician who is following set procedures. All that
Eichler does is to replace what she and many other feminists would agree are sexist
practices with practices which attempt to overcome only the sexism, rather than the
structural or cultural inequalities by which they are underpinned. Most feminists would
argue that following such a set of procedures would not produce feminist knowledge
because they reject the view that the researcher can be neutral. Feminists challenge
the assumption that knowledge exists not only independently of the person(s) who
produce it, but also that those who produce knowledge can do so without their values
and attitudes influencing the knowledge they produce. That is, even if there is a reality
independent of our understanding, we cannot reproduce that reality uncontaminated.
However, it is important to keep in mind that while feminist empiricists do subscribe
to the idea of an objective, knowable world (a realist ontology), they are also committed
to carrying out research for women and providing empirical knowledge to be used in
feminist politics and campaigns (see e.g. Riley, 1992). Ann Oakley (1998), as we noted
above, has recently advocated dissolving the dualism between quantitative and

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qualitative methods, and adopting a feminist empiricist approach which, she argues,
‘is more likely to promote policy-relevant research “for” women’ than other approaches
(p. 708). As Sara Delamont (2003, p. 71) notes, however, ‘this assumes a rationality
among policy researchers that those who are not liberal feminists with a faith in the
Enlightenment project do not share’.

Feminist standpoint epistemology

As Sandra Harding (2004a, p. 1) puts it in her introduction to The Standpoint Theory

Reader, ‘standpoint theory has continued to attract both enthusiasts and critics during
the three decades of its recent history’; it has also begun to evolve into a range
of perspectives and has certainly not responded stubbornly to its critics. Since it was
introduced in the 1970s, it has influenced a number of feminist thinkers, and has been
the focus of ongoing debates within academic feminism (Harding, 2004b). Standpoint
feminists seek to justify their research findings as better, more adequate, than those
produced by the malestream or other feminist researchers. Standpoint epistemology
is a position most closely associated with materialist perspectives (including Marxist
feminism, dual-systems theory and critical feminist theory – see Chapter 2) and takes
a realist stance – that is it believes that there is an underlying material reality that
structures the social world. As one of its main advocates, Nancy Hartsock (1998,
p. 400) has argued, in standpoint epistemology ‘the understanding of the relation
between knowledge and power present in Marx’s work provides important criteria
for what can count as better, or more privileged, knowledges’. In Hartsock’s work
particularly, standpoint epistemology involves the adoption of what Marxists describe
as ‘the dialectical method’; a way of thinking about the social world that involves
replacing the idea that the world is composed of ‘things’ with an emphasis on the
importance of ‘processes’, and of understanding these processes within the context
of the social totality. Malestream theory, it is argued by feminists who adopt this
position, has a distorted or partial view of this reality, and has ignored the social
processes that shape women’s lives, but feminist research is able to provide a better,
less partial account of these processes (like the ways in which certain types of work
come to be gendered, for instance).
The concept of a ‘standpoint’ is based on the view that what we do (our social
position, determined primarily for Marxist feminists by the sexual division of labour)
shapes what we know (our view of the social world). A standpoint is therefore a
perspective or viewpoint based on our social position, and the concept of a standpoint
epistemology is derived from the Marxist proposition, associated largely with the work
of Georg Lukacs, that there is a discernible ‘standpoint of the proletariat’. This idea
takes as its starting point the Marxist view that human activity (material life) shapes
our consciousness (our subjective perception of the world, and how we experience
it). As Hartsock (1998, p. 402) notes: ‘Both Marx and Lukacs recognized that truth and
power are intimately connected: what is to count as truth, methods for obtaining it,
criteria for evaluation – all are profoundly influenced by extant power relations.’
This position shares with positivism a realist ontology and the view that trained
or well-educated experts have a greater degree of knowledge and understanding of

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how to access and explain that reality than others. However, unlike positivists, stand-
point epistemologists also emphasise that the production of knowledge is a politically
engaged activity. Malestream researchers have often refused to acknowledge this, but
it is a problem which feminist researchers have confronted. They want to reject the
view that all knowledge is equally valid (relativism) and to argue that it is essential to
be able to justify some research findings and theoretical explanations as more adequate
than others. If this is not possible then it is difficult to see why feminist research find-
ings and explanations should be seen as better or more true than malestream ones. It
is necessary to be able to demonstrate that some statements are better accounts of
social reality than others, while recognising their inevitable partiality.
All knowledge is based on experience, and standpoint theorists claim their research
is scientifically preferable because it originates in and is tested against a more complete
and less distorted kind of experience than malestream research. Human activity, it
is suggested, structures and sets limits to human understanding, as what we do shapes
and constrains what we can know. However, human activity is structured for and
experienced differently by men and women because the latter are subordinated;
feminist sociologists have a privileged access to real social reality because the oppressed
can see people and events as they really are. In the words of Dorothy Smith (1987),
they have ‘a wider angle of view because they can see things from the perspective
of not only the privileged (men) but also the oppressed women’ (p. 99). There is an
important claim to power here – the power of knowledge and the power to claim true
knowledge. Knowledge production is seen as a political process, with some knowledge
claims being seen as superior to others.
Standpoint theorists argue that men’s knowledge can never be complete. It is
not just that the oppressed can see more, but also that their knowledge emerges through
their struggle against oppression – women’s knowledge emerges from a struggle against
men and the attempt to replace the distorted knowledge produced by men, which
is used to control and subordinate women, with feminist knowledge. The feminist
standpoint is an achievement – it is the portrayal of social life from the viewpoint of the
activity which produces women’s social experience, not from the partial and perverse
perspective available from the ‘ruling gender’ experiences of men.
Standpoint feminists argue that their accounts of the social world are less partial
and less distorted than malestream ones. Feminist science is better able to reflect the
world as it is and is able to replace the distorted and distorting accounts produced
by malestream sociology and consequently to advance sociological knowledge. It is
based on the view that there is a real world, but that our accounts of it are always and
inevitably partial, and that feminist accounts are less partial and less distorted than
malestream ones. They emphasise particularly the subjective implications of the sexual
division of labour for women’s knowledge of the social world. For feminists such as
Nancy Hartsock, men’s and women’s different experiences of work shape their
different views of social reality.
Where standpoint epistemology becomes slightly complex, and for many
feminists particularly problematic, is in the claim that the standpoint of the oppressed
offers a clearer vision – a more accurate, or objective perception of reality that is,
ultimately, more emancipatory. This is what Hartsock (drawing on Marx) calls an
‘oppositional consciousness’ – a view of the social world that is not driven by the

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maintenance of ideology, but by the desire to uncover the ‘truth’ of an objective reality.
Undistorted by a political interest in maintaining a relatively powerful position, femi-
nist knowledge (knowledge produced by the oppressed) is thus believed to be less
ideological, and more truthful. In terms of this latter point, however, some standpoint
epistemologists (particularly those who might more accurately be described as femi-
nist critical theorists than Marxist feminists) tend to reject the concept of absolute,
objective truth in favour of ‘certitude’. Their concern is with the accumulation of
knowledge that is credible; that is, ‘good enough’ to act upon (Benhabib, 1992). For
standpoint feminists, then, the imperatives for producing feminist knowledge are not
simply epistemological, but political.
However, standpoint feminists have been criticised for ignoring differences
between women and for assuming an unproblematic commonality. Standpoint episte-
mology tends to assume that oppression is somehow unitary, or that women identify
primarily as women rather than as members of other oppressed or privileged groups
in society. The ‘adding on’ of difference – race, age, sexuality, etc. – is done in an
unproblematic way that assumes that middle-class white feminist theory can be used
to theorise the experience of all women. The same criticism can probably be made of
the inclusion of women as a category in malestream research – it does not take account
of differences that are the outcome of processes of racism, ageism, heterosexism that
result in super- and subordination.
Some Black feminists, for example Patricia Hill Collins, have argued that as a
more oppressed group Black women’s standpoint is not only different from but
has a wider angle of vision than white women’s standpoint. Subsequently (1990),
however, she has questioned this earlier argument that the more oppressed you
are the more ‘correct’ your analysis of the social origins of oppression. Instead she has
argued that Black women’s accounts of the social world are different from but not
necessarily better than white women’s. Arguably this raises the question of how we
choose the ‘best’ accounts of reality. Alternatively, it can be argued that all knowledge
is partial and that accounts from different standpoints will add to our knowledge and
understanding of social reality, a point to which we return towards the end of this
chapter.

Feminist constructivism

Feminist constructivism challenges the foundationalism of both positivistic and

standpoint epistemologies and argues for a social constructionist approach to know-
ledge. Foundationalism is the view that reality is singular and exists ‘out there’
independently of our understanding of it, available for experts to probe and discover
– for example that capitalism and patriarchy have an independent objective reality
discoverable by experts. Constructivism argues that the social world is constructed and
shaped by members of society – they reject the claim that there is a ‘true’ knowledge
which certifies some feminist knowledge as better than, superior to, other feminist or
non-feminist knowledges.
In rejecting the standpoint position, they argue that there cannot be a feminist
science and that academic feminists who advocate the standpoint position are only

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trying to set up a new truth. These feminists are deeply sceptical about claims to
universal knowledge and argue that there is no social world or set of social structures
‘out there’ waiting to be known, but only many subjective experiences. ‘All that feminist
(or indeed any) researchers can do is to uncover the many stories that different women
tell and reveal the different knowledges that they have’ (see Stanley and Wise, 1983,
pp. 145–148). In a later book (1993), Liz Stanley and Sue Wise argue that all knowledge
is a product of human social experience: ‘Thus there is no way of moving outside of
experience to validate theories ‘objectively’ – nothing exists other than social life, our
place within it and our understandings of all this’ (p. 193). In this later work, they argue
for a position which they describe as ‘fractured foundationalism’; a position that does
not dispute the existence of truth and a material reality, but acknowledges that
judgements about them are always relative to the context within which such knowledge
is produced. This perspective emphasises that researchers are not intellectually
superior to their respondents, and that they have the responsibility to produce reflexive
accounts of both their research process and of the findings, so that readers can have
access to the procedures which underlie the way that knowledge is presented and
constructed by the researcher.
Feminists such as these are critical of malestream research because of its claims
to objectivity, and the claim that the researcher is not involved in the research process.
They reject the view that the sociologist can be a dispassionate and uncritical ‘scientific’
observer and argue that the experiences and feelings of the subject should be at the
centre of the production of all social knowledge. In their early work, Stanley and Wise
(1983) argued that in presenting accounts of their research researchers often ‘do
not tell it as it happened’ but present a reconstructed account of how the research
was undertaken that accords with textbook prescriptions. Not only are these accounts
false, but they fail to reveal the ways in which the researcher was involved in the
research process. Consequently they argue that feminist research must be genuinely
reflexive – that is, the accounts of the research must make available to the reader the
procedures which underlie the way the knowledge which is presented was produced,
and draw on the ‘intellectual autobiography’ of the researchers. (Letherby’s (2002)
account of researching childless women, which draws on Stanley and Wise, is a notable
example of autobiography in feminist research.) It is also essential not to deny one’s
experiences and feelings as a feminist, they argue, but to use them as part of the pro-
cess of validating one’s research rather than vice versa – that is we should accept
the validity of our own experiences as women as the basis for feminist knowledge.
The adequacy of feminism is based on the extent to which it enables us to understand
better our situation as women and gives us the resources with which to emancipate
ourselves.
This position rejects the idea of feminist grand theory but argues that women do
have a unity of experience in the same way that racialised groups, lesbian women,
disabled people, and so on do. These social/political constructions, it argues, are
fundamental to the systematic assignment of positions of super- and subordination.
However, it is also necessary for feminist theorisation to take account of the multiple
fragmentation of women’s experiences of oppression, based on age, sexuality,
race, disability, and so on. It argues for the valid existence of varieties of feminist
epistemology, together with the

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acknowledgment of the contextual specificity of feminist as of other knowledge.

The recognition that who a researcher is, in terms of their sex, race, class and
sexuality, affects what they ‘find’ in research is as true of feminists as any other
researchers.
(Stanley and Wise, 1993, p. 228)

The major problem with this position is its relativism. While we agree that
researchers must be reflexive, that women must speak for themselves and that research
findings should help the oppressed, we are sceptical of the view that all women’s
accounts are equally valid and that there is no way of selecting between them. If all
women’s accounts are equally valid, how can a feminist researcher claim that her
version is more ‘true’ than those of others? One way of responding to this question
is to adopt Letherby’s (2002) position that, while researchers may not necessarily be
intellectually superior to respondents, they do nevertheless occupy an intellectually
privileged position that provides a basis for their claims both to be able to interpret and
contextualise the views or experiences of their respondents, at the same time as
claiming that these interpretations constitute knowledge of the social world. Hence,
Letherby’s position (one with which we would agree) is that convincing claims to
feminist knowledge are based not necessarily on intellectual superiority but on
‘epistemic privilege’. This issue becomes particularly significant for feminist researchers
who undertake research on non- or anti-feminist women, for whom claims to know
‘better’ than other women can become especially problematic.
In her discussion of some of the methodological and epistemological issues
involved in doing feminist research on non-feminist women scientists in the UK, Millen
(1997) argues that we need to define feminist research ‘in terms of values which it
might uphold rather than techniques it might use’. A key issue, she notes, is the conflict
between the researcher and the participants’ construction of the meaning of gendered
experience. Like Letherby, Millen attempts to resolve some of the epistemological
dilemmas involved in the conflict between respondents’ and researchers’ meanings
by drawing on both feminist standpoint epistemology and insights derived from
postmodernism feminism. Again, in a similar vein to Letherby, she argues that the role
of the researcher is to make sense of experiences and to locate individuals within
historical and social contexts. For her,

it is neither possible (nor, to my mind, even desirable) that the researcher should
disclaim her privilege with respect to participants, in terms of her greater know-
ledge of the issues raised and of the theoretical framework of the research and
of social life generally.
(Millen, 1997, para. 3.4)

Clearly there are some complex issues here that need to be disentangled, and Millen
goes on to substantiate the notion of epistemic privilege, by arguing that

Firstly, it is facile to assume that the analysis of experience necessarily means

the exploitation of experience to the detriment of the participant, or that the
researcher’s reinterpretation of that experience will change its fundamental

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meaning to the participant. The participant will always own the construction of
meaning she has ascribed to experience, regardless of the interpretation placed
upon this by the researcher within the publication of his or her work. Secondly,
the researcher is the one who has been motivated to explore the theoretical ideas
before conducting research, and to try to construct knowledge from experience:
it is a practical necessity that some individuals should do it, if we are ever to have
any knowledge at all.
(Millen, 1997, para. 3.4)

A key issue for both Letherby and Millen, then, in their attempts to address some
of the problems associated with Stanley and Wise’s ‘fragmented foundationalist’
approach, is the relationship between representation and reflexivity, as well as between
knowledge and power in shaping epistemic privilege. This latter theme in particular
has been of central concern to those feminists whose epistemological perspective is
allied most closely with the theoretical ideas associated with postmodernism and
poststructuralism.

Postmodern feminist epistemologies

Postmodern perspectives on knowledge tend to vary between an extreme position

maintaining that all knowledge is relative and a more moderated version of post-
modernism (not unlike Stanley and Wise’s ‘fragmented foundationalism’) characterised
by the contention that all knowledge is socially situated and contextual. This latter
approach (one with which we are more sympathetic than the former) has been easier
for feminists to develop alliances with (particularly Black and post-colonial feminists)
because it emphasises that what becomes accepted as ‘the truth’ and what is thought
of as a viable claim to knowledge is disproportionately associated with powerful social
groups. Hence, this approach derives largely from Foucault (1980) the idea that power
and knowledge are inseparable.
In epistemological terms, syntheses of feminism and postmodernism have placed
a considerable emphasis on plurality, the contextual basis of knowledge and the con-
tingent nature of reality. Much of the postmodern feminist approach has been based
largely on a critique of the realist ontology that underpins both feminist empiricism and
standpoint epistemology. Instead, postmodern feminists emphasise that reality is
socially constructed and is shaped by the existence of multiple truths that, they argue,
cannot be explained with reference to any single metanarrative. For those feminists
influenced particularly by the poststructuralist insights of Foucault and Derrida (see
Chapter 2), what we come to think of as ‘reality’ is largely the outcome of discourse,
and is shaped by the interrelationship between power, knowledge and language. For
these feminists, competing epistemological or ‘truth’ claims merely add layer upon
layer to these discursive constructions of reality.
In complete contrast to the attempt to construct a non-sexist approach to feminist
research, or a feminist standpoint, postmodern feminists have proposed theories which
discard entirely the possibility of accessing a single, objective ‘truth’ whether it is done
by non-sexist, empirical research methods, or by privileging women’s experiences

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or everyday lives. Postmodern feminism involves a critique both of the idea of a

standpoint, and of the notion of a stable subject as the focus of standpoint research.
McLennan (1995, p. 392) sums this position up when she argues that ‘the search for
a unitary notion of “truth” about the world is impossible, a relic of the sterile
Enlightenment: knowledge is partial, profane and fragmented’. Rather than seeking
out a unifying epistemology, albeit one that incorporates sexual difference, we should
be developing ways of thinking about the social world that enable us to accept the
existence of multiple truths. In this sense, as Millen put it, postmodernism feminism

Exposes the tension at the heart of feminist research most acutely. On the one
hand, it embodies and empowers feminism as a tool for critical examination of
epistemology and praxis, and provides additional critical tools for the examination
of power and knowledge. It points out that power is not unitary, and that some
forms of power are situated and concentrated. . . . However, in the act of so doing
it may seriously undermine the political role of feminist research, of incorporating
women’s lives and gendered experience into the corpus of knowledge. . . . On a
practical level, do postmodernist ideas about the status of theory and of methods
of inquiry rule out many ways of gathering knowledge which might have some
political utility for the feminist project?
(Millen, 1997, para. 7.8)

What the variety of disparate approaches to knowledge, truth and reality that
could broadly be termed postmodernist or poststructuralist seem to share in common
is the conviction that there are multiple truths, and that all knowledge is relative to
the social context and position of the knowing subject. This is both potentially valuable
and problematic for feminists. On the one hand, the relativism that this implies could,
in this sense, perhaps be understood as an anti-epistemology. Elizabeth Grosz (1995),
for instance, has argued that knowledges are merely perspectives produced from
a multiplicity of vantage points. This has led some feminists (notably those advocating
a standpoint approach) to argue that postmodernism is politically disabling for femi-
nism, because it negates the possibility of the feminist claim to ‘know’ that the social
world as it is currently organised serves to oppress women as a social group.
On the other hand, in taking philosophy and theories of knowledge as its critical
object, feminist theory influenced by postmodernism has tended to regard decon-
struction as a political activity in itself. In this sense, feminist research involving
deconstruction has tended to focus on the ways in which what we term knowledge
or truth is the outcome of a series of binary oppositions and power relations. Hence,
postmodern feminists argue that supposedly neutral, sexually indifferent or universal
‘truths’ merely conceal masculine interests and perceptions of reality.
One particular feminist writer associated with this approach is Susan Hekman.
Like many contemporary thinkers, Hekman sees modern Western thought as struc-
tured according to a series of dualisms. The three she focuses on are rational/irrational,
subject/object and culture/nature. In her book Gender and Knowledge (1990) she
discusses masculinity and femininity in relation to each of these three dualisms claiming
that, in each case, feminists have responded to them by arguing that either women
participate in the masculine, privileged side (e.g. the rational) as much as men do (e.g.

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as liberal feminists who advocate an empiricist epistemology), or that the feminine

side is really superior to the privileged side (e.g. as standpoint epistemologists).
Hekman’s general objection to these approaches is that they accept the dichotomies
and simply take one side or the other. Because the dichotomies are rooted in gender
dualisms, which are inherently hierarchical, any theory of knowledge that adopts them
merely perpetuates (however unwittingly), rather than deconstructs, male domination.
In her critique of the social construction of knowledge, French feminist writer
Luce Irigaray (1993) argues, similarly, that men conceal and rationalise their domi-
nation by claiming that their interests and views are universal and neutral. She argues
that this is possible only because universal claims to truth are grounded in cultural
processes that correlate men’s ways of knowing with the mind and women’s with the
body and ‘instinct’ or ‘intuition’ (and hence, as natural, irrational, unreasonable and
subjective). She argues that within a philosophical tradition that has consistently
equated women with the body and men with the mind (and which has prized the latter
over the former), men have been able to establish and maintain their position as
disembodied, universal and ‘perspectiveless’ knowing subjects.
The role of feminist epistemology from this perspective is to reveal the ways
in which men have defined and described the social world as they see and experience
it – from their point of view, while claiming that this is an absolute truth (de Beauvoir,
1988 [1949]). As well as emphasising the social construction of knowledge and the
discursive nature of reality, a postmodernist approach to feminism also emphasises
the importance of highlighting the existence of multiple truths (rather than simply
men’s and women’s standpoints). Anna Yeatman (1994) sums this up when she argues
that a postmodernist epistemology involves:

1 a deconstructive approach to understanding the discursive nature of the social

world;
2 a critique of metanarratives, and of claims to universal knowledge of the social world
as an objective reality;
3 a relational, contextual theory of knowledge and truth as plural;
4 an emphasis on the embodied nature of knowledge; and
5 a conception of language as a material, active, productive system.

Postmodernists therefore reject the ‘will to truth’ that they associate with
Enlightenment thought, and the view that there can be true knowledge – that feminist
knowledge is better than, truer than malestream knowledge. For this reason they argue
that standpoint feminism, which does not challenge the idea of a valid or universal
truth, cannot handle the concept of multiple realities or deconstructionist ideas.
Carol Smart’s account of the relationship between power, knowledge and the law
is a notable example of feminist deconstruction underpinned by a postmodernist
epistemology. As she argues,

I want to attempt to analyse law in a way which recognises the power of law
to disqualify or silence, yet does not seek to posit an alternative truth as the main
strategy to resist legal discourse.
(Smart, 1995, p. 78)

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Using rape as the main example, she goes on to suggest that acknowledging the
existence of multiple truths could be an important political strategy for feminism: ‘My
point is that there may be other accounts of rape [than legal ones] which could become
forms of resistance rather than sources of victimisation’ (p. 86). However, she refuses
to privilege any account as more ‘true’, or more accurate than others, and indeed
parenthetically indicates that if women did take up an account that enabled them to
resist the ways in which rape victims are characterised within legal discourse they
might lose the existing protection from the law. This means that we are left with the
view that all sociology can do is ‘construct subversive knowledge’ (p. 230).
Whilst many of the conceptual insights of postmodernism have made a significant
contribution to feminist ideas, its epistemological implications have been subject to
several criticisms. These include claims that:

1 The position is self-defeating in philosophical terms – it elevates the principle of

‘no truth except within a discourse’ to a general principle which is true outside
of discourse (and, indeed, it is impossible to enunciate a general principle which
others are to believe and not do so).
2 It effectively abolishes both sociology and feminism as academic modes of research
– if there are no general categories, then there can be no study of structured
inequalities or power relations and no attempt to understand women’s oppression.
We sympathise with and are much influenced by postmodernism’s insistence on
the specific, the detailed, and the difference between elements which ‘grand theory’
may wish to combine. Nonetheless we still see the need for grand theory, however
tentative it may have to be and however necessary it may be to remember that what
is true of a collective does not necessarily explain the actions and experiences of
any individual member of it. (See also Rattansi (1995), who makes the case for
avoiding a polarisation into ‘the postmodern’ and ‘the rest’.)
3 Postmodernism appears to abolish politics: if, for example, the category ‘woman’
is meaningless, then the notion of women (or other groups) fighting their oppressors
is equally meaningless.
4 Finally, postmodernism strongly suggests that the subject is fragmented and that it
makes little sense to talk about it as a coherent bounded whole which acts and
takes decisions. Again we understand the force of this position. If taken to the
extreme, however, it negates ethics, because there is no self to take responsibility
for actions.

Nevertheless, as many feminists have recently argued, postmodernist insights

can be used to continually reflect on the role of feminist research, and on the gendered
aspects of malestream research. There is an argument, for instance, for drawing
on postmodernist concepts of discourse and plurality in this respect, as well as the
idea, developed particularly by Donna Haraway (1991, 2004), that all knowledge is
‘situated’.

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Epistemic communities

Bringing together elements of both standpoint epistemology and postmodernist

feminism, some feminists, such as Alison Assiter (1996), have developed the idea that
there is not one standpoint, but many. Drawing on critical theorist Jurgen Habermas,
Assiter develops the idea that what locates feminist women in a shared epistemological
standpoint is not a homogenous social identity or position, but a shared political
interest (in emancipation). She describes not a woman’s standpoint, then, but a feminist
one, as an ‘epistemic community’. As she puts it,

An epistemic community . . . will be a group of individuals who share certain

fundamental interests, values and beliefs in common, for example, that sexism is
wrong, that racism is wrong, and who work on consequences of these presup-
positions. . . . Thus, feminists world-wide, despite our numerous disagreements,
share a commitment to modifying and helping to eliminate power differentials
based on gender. . . . Feminists may argue about what ‘gender’ means and what
‘power’ means, and how these differentials have come about. Yet there is a broad
commitment to a set of values, and it is this commitment, I am suggesting that
makes feminists as a group, world-wide, an epistemic community.
(Assiter, 1996, pp. 82–83)

This leads her to develop the idea of epistemic communities defined not according to
universal experience or homogenous identity (in the more traditional Marxist sense),
but as contextually specific. Unlike the concept of a standpoint, therefore, an epistemic
community is believed to be contingent and contextual, yet bound together by shared
political interests. As Assiter puts it, ‘its boundaries are constantly shifting, and it may
go in and out of existence’ (p. 95).
Although realist in its orientation, the concept of an epistemic community does
not assume an Enlightenment ‘view from nowhere’ from which the truth is revealed.
Rather, it is ‘historically located, its beliefs and its experiences are inflected by the
values it holds’ (p. 95). However,

The nature of the values upheld by any one community are such as to undermine
the claims to ‘truth’ made by other communities. The claims of any one com-
munity are not true for all times and in all places; rather they are open to constant
revision by other communities.
(Assiter, 1996, p. 95)

In a sense, the idea of an epistemic community vindicates both realism and relativism,
albeit in a mediated, situated form.
A not dissimilar approach has been developed by Sandra Harding (2004a, b) in
her work on standpoint epistemology, in which she attempts to defend standpoint
theory from postmodernist criticism by articulating a version adequate not only for
a postmodern context, but also a post-colonial era. In this sense, she draws on work
by bell hooks (1990) on the epistemological ‘politics of location’, by Chela Sandoval
(1991) on a ‘differential oppositional consciousness’ amongst women in developing

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countries, and also Uma Narayan (1989) on the epistemological implications of global
power relations.
Although a useful attempt to draw together two apparently conflicting theories of
knowledge within feminism (standpoint epistemology and postmodernism), approaches
such as these nevertheless remain problematic not least because (from a postmodernist
perspective) they continue to assume a degree of unity and, particularly in the case of
Assiter’s concept of a feminist ‘epistemic community’, a shared goal of emancipation
amongst feminists. At the other extreme, a more materialist approach would argue that
an element of relativism remains in these ‘multiple standpoint’ approaches, in so far
as the question ‘Who is the final arbiter of truth?’ remains unaddressed.

Conclusions

We are not suggesting that one feminist epistemology is correct and that others are
wrong. (While attacking postmodernism as an epistemological stance, for example,
we are nonetheless very much influenced by it.) We have tried to point out some of
the inadequacies of epistemological positions, and we see this as constructive rather
than destructive; it is by recognising what an epistemology cannot explain that we can
develop more sophisticated ones. Our major contention in this book has been that
mainstream sociology is inadequate because it ignores, distorts or marginalises
women. It is inadequate not only because it does not fully incorporate women, but
because the knowledge it produces is at best partial because it does not take account
of over half of the population. Women have often found that the knowledge provided
by conventional sociology does not relate to their lives or their concerns.
Feminism does seek to speak to the experiences of women, to understand reality
from the viewpoint of women, to ask questions that relate to women’s lives and to
uncover the systematic biases and distortions in malestream knowledge. In this book
we have tried to show the ways in which feminist scholarship has made a contribution
to sociology. We have argued that this does not mean that we can just add one more
perspective to the list of sociological topics. What is necessary is a total rethinking of
sociological knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge is produced. This is
because it is not accidental or the result of an oversight that women have been ignored,
marginalised or distorted in sociology, but the outcome of the theoretical and historical
underpinning of the discipline. Until relatively recently, malestream sociology failed
to confront the assumption that women are naturally determined and that women’s
role is the outcome of biological imperatives. Consequently the concepts developed
to carry out sociological research, and the issues deemed worthy of being researched,
often ignored women. To produce adequate sociological knowledge it is necessary
to reformulate these concepts and questions so that women become central to the
concerns of the discipline.
A key question, however, is whether feminists have epistemological privilege –
whether they can provide more adequate, better theoretical understanding than
malestream theorists. Standpoint feminists argue that women as an oppressed group
do provide more adequate, better accounts than malestream theorists. In other words,
they are suggesting that feminist epistemology is privileged. In opposition to this, Liz

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Stanley and Sue Wise (1993) argue that feminist epistemologies provide a different
view on what is taken for ‘reality’ and that it may indeed be a preferable view. They
suggest that it is an authentic position because it posits the oppressed as superior.
However, they reject the view of the hierarchical relationship and indicate the problem
of how we determine whose work to privilege as ‘the oppressed’, when we consider
race and ethnicity, sexuality, disability, global power relations, and so on. They ask how
claims to superior knowledge are to be adjudicated. Rejecting the argument that the
category ‘woman’ is oppressed and that suffering is used to calculate whose knowledge
is to be privileged, they argue that there are:

no foundational grounds for judging the a priori superiority of the epistemologies

of the oppressed, nor of any one group of the oppressed, in the production
of knowledge and the settling of its problems . . . there are, however, moral and
political grounds for finding one of them preferable . . . the grounds of preference
are . . . that it better fits with proponents’ experiences of living or being or
understanding.
(Stanley and Wise, 1993, p. 228)

For us, the turn to feminist theory was to enable us to make sense of women’s lives,
and the ways in which society is shaped by sexual difference (the differences between
men and women as social subjects) – something which malestream theories did
not. However, we accept that feminist theories have themselves been partial and
inadequate, that they were constructed largely from the point of view of white,
Western, middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual women and therefore are seen as
inadequate from the position of many women. Nevertheless, we do believe that all
women share the experience of being exploited and subordinated because of sexual
difference and that this provides the basis for commonality, while recognising that
there are also important differences between women. Furthermore, we see the
construction of theory as dynamic, developing both in response to critique and to the
complex task of explaining changing ‘realities’ (however we conceptualise those
realities). The relationship between theories and the social world they are trying to
make sense of is dynamic, not static. Theories are modified and changed as part of the
continuing development of sociology as a discipline and, indeed – as we indicated in
the Introduction – sociology has finally begun to take account of feminist criticisms
and contributions, although the sociological imagination is still some way from being
as gendered as the social world it seeks to understand.

SUMMARY

1 Research methods are not just ‘tools of the trade’: what gives meaning
to the research is the underlying theory and epistemology used. The
methods at the more quantified ‘positivistic’ end of the spectrum claim
to be more scientific and neutral and for this reason feminists have

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attacked them, arguing that they in fact represent a malestream view

of the world under the guise of science.
2 Feminists have tended to espouse qualitative methods as the better
means for carrying out feminist research because they imply more
equality between researcher and researched; they allow the viewpoint
of the researched to be taken into account, and they do not turn the
researched into fragmented objects.
3 Four feminist positions on epistemology have been described –
empiricist, standpoint, constructivist and postmodern.
4 More recently, feminists have developed the concept of ‘epistemic
communities’ and have highlighted the epistemological politics of post-
colonialism.

FURTHER READING

Delamont, S. (2003) Feminist Sociology. London: Sage. More sociological than the other texts
listed here, this is an excellent starting point for a consideration of the feminist critique of
sociology, and of the production of feminist knowledge. It focuses particularly on methodological
debates within sociology, but also engages with epistemological issues and includes a (brief)
consideration of standpoint epistemology and postmodernism. It also explores malestream
responses to feminist debates on methodology and epistemology (see Chapter 1).
Harding, S. (ed.) (2004) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political
Controversies. London: Routledge. This is the first anthology to collect some of the most important
essays on feminist epistemology into a single volume. It includes a range of ‘classic’ contributions
from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a series of critical engagements and more recent
contributions from well-known theorists, and relatively neglected works by post-colonial writers.
Kemp, S. and Squires, J. (1997) Feminisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Part of the Oxford
Reader series, this collection includes two large sections on ‘Academies’ and ‘Epistemologies’
which address many of the issues considered in this chapter. Again, it incorporates a broad
range of ideas and is not limited to white, Western academic feminism.

385
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Additional web-based resources

http://www.eserver.org/feminism/index.html
A US based website with very useful links to women’s studies programmes at various
universities as well as to women’s libraries. This site also includes useful sections on
feminist activism and history.

http://www.sociologyonline.co.uk
A useful introductory site that makes links between topical issues and sociological
concepts. Ideal for A level students.

http://www.un.org
This is the home page for the United Nations, with a wide range of links to material on
gender related topics.

http://www.amnesty.org
An excellent site for material on human rights and inequalities. It also has a vast number
of links to research reports and to other relevant sites.

http://www.eoc.org.uk
The home page of the Equal Opportunities Commission in the UK. A very useful source
of research material, with excellent links to publications and research reports.

http://www.cre.gov.uk
Similar to the EOC site and very user-friendly, this is a useful source of material on
issues relating to race and ethnicity.

http://www.who.org
This is the homepage of the World Health Organization, and contains many useful links
as well as downloadable publications and research reports on a range of gender related
topics.

http://www.unicef.org
This is the homepage of UNICEF, which provides information and a range of down-
loadable publications on children across the world.

411
 Author index

Abberley, P. 79 Atchley, R. 136

Abbott, P. 69, 74, 91, 114, 175–7, 195, 252,
311: see also Tyler, M. Bagilhole, B.: see Cross, S.
Abel Smith, B. 194 Baldock, J. 171
Abrahams, J. 98, 101 Baldwin, S. 239
Abu-Habib, L. 78 Bales, R.: see Parsons, T.
Acker, J. 64, 69 Ball, S. 98
Acker, S. 99–101 Banet-weiser, S. 359
Ackers, L. 171: see also Abbott, P. Barkhatov, D. 119
Adams, N. 359 Barnard, M.: see McKeganey, N.
Adkins, L. 220, 223, 241, 254 Barnes, C. 77
Adorno, T. 323, 330–2, 340, 350, 362 Barrett, M. 62, 110–111, 151, 318: see also
Aftab, K. 359 McIntosh, M.
Alam, S. 86 Barry, A.M. 197
Alcoff, L. 368: see also Potter, E. Barry, K. 217
Alexander, P. 219 Bart, P.: see Scully, D.
Allan, J. 257 Barthes, R. 328–9, 337
Allen, H. 278 Bartky, S.L. 131, 358
Allen, J.: see Myhill, A. Bates, I. 89, 104–5, 111
Allen, I. 258, 260 Baudrillard, J. 41, 338–9
Allen, S. 69, 74: see also Walkowitz, C. Bauman, Z. 209
Althusser, L. 326–7, 362 Beasley, C. 15, 27, 29–31, 36, 41, 48, 52
Alvermann, D.: see Commeyras, M. Beck, U. 154, 157
Alvesson, M. 271 Beck-Gernsheim, E.: see Beck, U.
Amir, M. 294 Beechey, V.157
Amnesty International xii, 212 Begum, N. 78
Amos, V. 112 Bell, D. 13, 267
Anderson, B. 240 Benhabib, S. 29, 43–4, 46, 375
Ang, I. 348–9 Bernard, J. 158, 184
Ankomah, A. 227 Bettis, P.: see Adams, N.
Annandale, E. 197 Beynon, H. 268
Anthias, F. 62, 73, 75, 88: see also Bhachu, P.: see Westwood, S.
Yuval-Davis, N. Bhavnani, K. 71
Applegate, J. 257 Black Report, The 140, 175
Arber, S. 137, 139, 141, 143, 176, 184, 190 Blackwell, 271
Arnot, M. 98 Blaxter, M. 179
Ashton, H. 177 Blumberg, R.L. 84
ASE (Association for Science Education) Bordo, S. 9, 224
103–4 Bouquet, T. 293–4
Assiter, A. 382–3 Bourdieu, P. 65, 252, 322

412
 AUTHOR INDEX

Bourlet, A. 295, 297 Coats, M. 98

Bourque, S. 304 Cockburn, C. 264
Bovill, M.: see Livingston, S. Coe, T. 263
Bowles, S. 110–111 Coffey, A. 116
Box, S. 273, 278 Cohen, P. 336–7
Boyar, K. 253, 255 Cohen, R. 88
Bradley, H. 256 Colgan, F. 316
Bradshaw, J. 101–2, 172 Collinson, D.: see Collinson, M.
Brah, A. 75 Collinson, M. 264
Braham, P. 71 Columbus, C. 48
Branston, G. 334 Commeyras, M. 101
Braverman, H. 253, 265 Connell, R.W. 60, 352
Brewis, J. 264 Cook, D. 282
Brine, J. 116 Cooper, C.: see Davidson, M.
British Crime Survey 287 Cornell, D.: see Benhabib, S.
Brittain, V. 61 Cornwell, J. 179
Britten, N.: see Heath, A. Coward, R. 227, 319, 350
Brooks, A. 53–4 Cowie, C. 133
Brown, G. 167, 172, 183 Coyle, A. 249
Brownmiller, S. 292 Cram, F.: see Jackson, S.
Bruce, J. 181 Cressey, D.: see Sutherland, E.
Bryan, B. 112–3 Crompton, R. 58, 62, 65, 69–70, 248–9, 253
Burgess, A. 293 Cross, S. 257
Burgess, H. 99, 102 Crow, L. 78
Butler, J. 9, 63, 78, 206–7, 222–4 CSO (Central Statistical Office) 92, 306
Buurman, G. 79 Cumberbatch, G. 345–6
Cumming, E. 135
Cain, M. 273
Calas, M. 263 Dadzie, S.: see Bryan, B.
Calvert, P. 120 Dalley, G. 79
Calvert, S.: see Calvert, P. Dalton, K. 272
Cameron, D. 354–7, 361, 363 Daly, M. 34, 49, 173, 190
Campbell, B. 225 Darwin, C. 10
Campbell, C.: see Falk, P. David, M. 100, 166
Campbell, O.: see Koblinsky, M. Davidoff, L. 235
Caplan, P. 203 Davidson, M. 262–3: see also Cooper, C.
Carabine, J. 203–4 Davies, C. 261
Carby, H. 75 Davin, A. 97
Carlen, P. 280, 284–5 Davis, K. 131
Carter, J.74 De Beauvoir, S. 5, 7, 9, 40, 42, 165, 380
Cartmel, F.: see Furlong, A. Delamont, S. 11, 15, 64–5, 226, 373, 385
Castells, M. 267 Delphy, C. 148, 238: see also Leonard, D.
Cavendish, R. 250 Denfield, R. 51
CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Derrida, J. 41, 265, 378
Studies) 72, 128, 333, 335–8, 340–1 Deshormes La Valle, F. 237
Chaplin, R.: see Ruddock, J. Dobash, R.E.: see Dobash, R.P.
Chapman, D. 278 Dobash, R.P. 280, 295–7, 299
Chapman, R. 353–4, Doezema, J. 221: see also Kempadoo, K.
Chapman, T. 70 Doucet, A. 164
Cixous, H. 42, 54 Doyal, L. 59, 172, 175, 177, 179, 182–3, 185,
Clark, A. 191 197
Clarke, L. 291 Due Billing, Y.: see Alvesson, M.
Clarricoates, K. 102, 106 Duke, L. 348
Clegg, S.: see Bradshaw, J. Duncombe, J. 163
Cloward, R. 281 Durkheim, E. 279

413
AUTHOR INDEX

Dworkin, A. 217, 219 Gamarnikow, E. 192, 194

Dwyer, C. 91 Gamble, S. 51–3
Dyer, G. 344–5 Ganetz, H. 131–2
Dyer, R. 224 Garber, J.: see McRobbie, A.
Dyhouse, C. 96 Garber, L. 99
Garnsey, E. 70
Edgell, S, 164 Gavron, H. 237
Edwards, S. 293, 295, 297 Gedalof, I. 50
Ehrenreich, B. 190–1, 240 Geraghty, C. 348
Eichler, M. 371–2 Gerami, S. 162
Einhorn, B. 165, 234 Gherardi, S. 261, 263–4, 266
Eisner, M. 183 Giarchi, G. 138–9
Elkind, D. 118 Giddens, A. 13, 21, 206, 209, 229
Elliott, A. 17 Gilbourn, D. 95, 112–3
Elston, M.A. 258 Gilligan, C. 30
Engels, F. 10, 37–8, 149 Ginn, J.: see Arber, S.
England, P. 257 Gintis, H.: see Bowles, S.
English, D.: see Enhrenreich, B. Gittens, D. 122, 144
EOC (Equal Opportunities Commission) Glasgow University Media Research Group
93–4, 98–9, 106, 156, 233, 242–5, 333–5
246–7, 258–262, 268–9 Glasser, C. 348
Erskine, A.: see Alcock, P. Glendinning, C. 314
ESRC Violence Research Programme 288, Goddard-Spear, M. 101, 106
295 Goffee, R. 239
Ettore, E. 188 Goffman, E. 63
Evans, D. 205 Gold, K. 105
Evans, J. 32–3, 56, 195, 255–6 Golding, P.: see Murdock, G.
Evetts, J. 100 Goldman, R. 346–7
Eysenck, H.J. 72, 272 Goldthorpe, J. 65, 253
Graddol, D. 357
Falk, P. 131 Graham, H. 161, 167, 172, 176, 178, 186–7,
Faludi, S. 51 195, 252, 315
Fawcett, B. 78, 80 Gramsci, A. 326–7, 333–4, 337, 342, 346,
Filby, M. 254 362
Finch, J. 70, 159, 239–240, 370 Granleese, J. 262
Finkelstein, V. 78 Gray, J.: see Lesson, J.
Firestone, S. 165 Greed, C. 264
Fiske, J. 323, 362 Greenstein, F. 306
Flax, J. 43 Greer, G. xi, 49, 53
Flitcraft, A.H. 189 Gregory, J. 282
Fondas, N. 263 Griffin, C. 126, 129
Ford, J. 98 Grosz, E. 379
Foster, P. 174–5, 178 Groves, D. 140: see also Finch, J.
Foucault, M. 41, 43, 206–8, 214, 225, 265, Guillaumin, C. 78
358, 378 Guillebaud, J. 180
Francis, B. 101, 116 Gutteridge, S.: see Dobash, R.P.
Frazer, E. 344
Freedman, J. 15 Habermas, J. 382
Freedman, L.P. 174 Hakim, C. 248–9
Freud, S. 200 Hall, E. 253
Friedan, B. 32–3, 117, 141, 158, 319, 345 Hall, E.J. 52
Fuller, M. 113 Hall, L. 213
Furlong, A. 126 Hall, M. 223
Hall, R. 294
Gagnon, J. 203, 208 Hall, S. 59, 80–1, 128, 273, 335–6, 338, 358

414
 AUTHOR INDEX

Halsey, A.H. 65 James, N. 254

Halson, J. 133, 299–300 Jameson, F. 339
Hancock, P. 265 Jefferson, T.: see Hall, H.
Hanmer, J. 2, 224, 296, 299 Jefford, S. 353
Haraway, D. 54, 381 Jeffreys, S. 203, 212, 217–8, 309
Harding, J. 98 Jenks, C.: see James, A.
Harding, S. 44, 367, 373, 382, 385 Jensen, A. 72
Hargreaves, A. 98 Jezierski, M. 189
Harlow, S.: see Koblinsky, M. Johnson, N. 297
Harris, T.: see Brown, G. Johnson, R. 334
Hart, G.: see Whittaker, D. Johnson, T. 192
Hartmann, H. 38 Jones, G.: see Crompton, R.
Hartsock, N. 44–5, 47, 373–4 Jones, J.: see Popay, J.
Hawkes, G. 127, 182, 202, 208–9, 215, 229 Jones, K. 116
Hearn, J. 192 Jordan, E. 91, 115
Heath, A. 253 Julien, I. 352
Hebdige, D. 337
Heidensohn, F. 284, 301 Kaeser, L.: see Lincoln, R.
Hekman, S. 43–4, 379 Kahn, A. 174
Henry, W.: see Cumming, E. Kane, P. 176
Herbert, M.: see England, P. Kanter, R.M. 262
Hey, V. 91 Kehily, M.J. 115
Heywood, C. 121 Kellner, D. 323, 339
Hill Collins, P. 226, 375 Kelly, A. 98, 103, 105
Hite, S. 213–4 Kelly, E. 215, 299
Hochschild, A. R. 254–5: see also Kemp, S. 385
Ehrenreich, B. Kempadoo, K. 221
Hockey, J. 123, 137, 143, 258 Kent, J. 80
Hoff, L.A. 299 Kerfoot, D. 263
Hoggart, R. 323, 340 Knights, D.: see Kerfoot, D., Morgan, G.
Holland, J. 133, 202, 214, 222, 227, 357 Khotkina, Z. 151, 165, 234
Hollibaugh, A. 222 King, A. 354
Holmes, J. 357 Kingsley Kent, S. 201
Holmstrom, L.: see Burgess, A. Kirkby, D. 242
Holt, L.H.: see Kahn, A. Koblinsky, M. 183
Home Office 274–7, 288 Koedt, A. 222
Homer, M. 297 Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. 208
Horkheimer, M.: see Adorno, T. Kovatcheva, S.: see Wallace, C.
hooks, b. 8, 16, 49–50, 54, 62, 203, 216, 223, Kreshel, P.: see Duke, L.
225, 321, 382 Kristeva, J. 42, 54
Hughes, B. 188,: see also Paterson, K. Kuhn, A. 36
Hunt, K.: see Annandale, E. Kumar, S. 359
Hunt, P. 160, 164 Kurian, A. 85
Huntley, R. 211 Kurtin, M.: see Kumar, S.
Kushner, T. 82
Ibarra, H. 263
Ikkaracan, P. 127 Lach, M.A.: see Peterson, P.B.
Irigaray, L. 42, 310, 380 Lackoff, R. 355, 357, 361
Lahelma, E. 172, 176
Jackson, M. 201–3 Land, H. 171–2
Jackson, P. 107 Larkin, A.S. 321
Jackson, S. 88, 210–212, 214–6, 219, Larkin, G. 192
226–30, 292 Laurie, N. 89
Jagger, A. 27 Lawrence, B. 260
James, A. 125, 143: see also Hockey, J. Lazarsfeld, P.F. 305

415
AUTHOR INDEX

Lazzaro, M. V. 189 Maltby, T.: see Walker, A.

Leach, E. 144 Mama, A. 296–7
Ledwith, S.: see Colgan, F. Mandaraka-Sheppard, K. 280
Lee, N. 125 Mann, M.: see Crompton, R.
Lees, S. 64, 89, 91, 94, 103–6, 109–110, 129, Marcuse, H. 330–1, 340, 362
214, 281, 283, 289, 293, 301, 356 Marshment, M. 318–9
Le Feuvre, N.: see Crompton, R. Martin, E. 134
LeGrand, J. 177 Martin, J. 248, 253
Lehnerer, M.: see Gerami, S. Martin, S. 255
Leidner, R. 255 Marsden, D.: see Duncombe, J.
Leonard, D. 163: see Delphy, C., Hanmer, J. Marx, K. 37, 65, 325–6, 362, 373–4
Leonard, E.B. 280, 282–3 Matthews, R. 273
L’Esperance, J.: see Davidoff, L. Mawby, R. 278
Lesson, J. 178 May, M.: see Alcock, P.
Letherby, G. 369, 376–7 Mayall, B. 125
Levi-Strauss, C. 329, 337 Measor, L. 109–110
Lewis, A. 125 Mercer, G.: see Barnes, C.
Lewis, D.: see Clarke, L. Mercer, K.: see Julien, I.
Lewis, J. 171, 173 Meyer, M. 207, 224
Lim, Lin L. 217 Mickelson, R. A. 94
Lincoln, R. 180 Middleton, C.: see Miles, S.
Lindroos, M. 103 Miles, S. 99, 125
Lindsay, G.: see Lewis, A. Milkman, R. 283
Linstead, S.: see Brewis, J. Mill, H. Taylor: see Mill, J.S.
Livingston, S. 124 Mill, J. S. 309
Lloyd, M. 79–80, 198 Millen, D. 377–9
Locker, D. 179 Millett, K. 307
Lockwood, D. 70, 253 Mills, C. Wright 4, 15, 18, 20
Logue, B.: see Lynott, P.P. Minturn, L. 164
Lombroso, C. 272 Mirrlees-Black, C. 295
Lorber, J. 190, 195 Mirza, H. 94, 112–3: see also Gilbourn, D.
Lovenduski, J. 292, 295, 296 Modleski, T. 51, 321, 341, 349–50
Lucey, H. 89 Moir, A. 115
Lukacs, G. 373 Moir, B.: see Moir, A.
Lury, C. 131 Moore, H. 224
Lynott, P.P. 118 Mooore, L.J.: see Lorber, J.
Lyon, D. 339 Moore, S. 297
Lyotard, J-F. 22, 41 Morgan, D. 145
Morgan, G. 254
Mac an Ghaill, M. 114–115 Morris, A. 78–9, 280
Macdonald, M. 319, 346–8, 360 Morris, J. xii
McIntosh, M. 216: see Barrett, M. Mort, F. 352–4
Macionis, J. 15, 57, 81–3, 117–120, 135, Mulvey, L. 319–20, 358
136–7, 145, 153–4, 162, 169, 203–5, Muncie, J. 121
221, 250, 267, 322, 338, 361 Munro, M.: see Madigan, R.
McKeganey, N. 220 Murdock, G. 330
MacKinnon, C. 34, 211, 264, 294 Murphy, R. 67
McLennan, G. 379 Myhill, A. 288
Macpherson, Sir W. 74, 273
McFarlane, J.: see Lazzaro, M.V. Naffine, N. 278, 302
McRobbie, A. 129, 131–2, 319, 338, 341–4, Narayan, U. 383
348 Nash, K. 316
Madigan, R. 165 Nava, M. 132
Maguire, S. 297 Nayak, A.226
Maine, D.: see Freedman, L.P. Neale, B.: see Smart, C.

416
 AUTHOR INDEX

Nicholson, L. 40, 42 Reid, K. 180

Nixon, S. 353 Reinhartz, S. 368
NUT (National Union of Teachers) 98 Rich, A. 198, 212, 222
Richardson, D. 2, 205
O’Connell Davidson, J. 218, 220–221 Riley, D. 372
O’Reilly, K. 84 Ritzer, G. 325, 332–3, 361–2
Oakley, A. 7, 8, 10, 63, 69, 159, 164, 167, Roberts, C.: see Martin, J.
178–9, 186, 188, 194–5, 210, 232, Roberts, E. 149
237, 366–7, 369, 372: see also Roberts, H. 167, 178
Graham, H. Robinson, V.: see also Richardson, D.
Oakley, R.: see Oakley, A. Rodriguez, M.L.: see Hall, E.J.
Olin, L.: see Cloward, R. Roiphe, K. 51
Oliver, M. 76, 78 Rose, J. 201
Olsen, A.: see Seager, J. Roseneil, S. 311, 317
Olsen, V.: see Lewin, E. Rosener, J. 263
Oudshoorn, N. 134 Rowbotham, S. 62
Royal College of Practitioners
Paechter, N. 101 Rubin, G. 205
Pahl, J. 161, 189, 237, 296–7 Russell, R. 125–6, 131, 358–9
Parkin, F. 67 Rutherford, J.: see Chapman, R.
Parmar, P.: see Amos, V.
Parsons, T. 135, 146 Sahgal, G. 296
Pateman, C. 217 Salisbury, J.: see Jackson, P.
Paterson, K. 77–9 Sanders, T. 220–221
Penfold, M. 183 Sanderson, K.: see Crompton, R.
Petchesky, R.P. 188 Sandoval, C. 382
Peterson, P. B. 101 Sapsford, R. 123, 312: see also Abbott, P.
Phillips, A. 241, 265 Sassetti, M. R
Phillipson, C. 135 Saul, J. 49, 56, 162
Phizacklea, A. 74 Saunders, S.: see Hanmer, J.
Phoenix, A. 112 Saussure, F. de 328
Pill, D. 179 Savage, M. 88
Plant, S. 54–5, 360 Savage, W. 186
Plummer, K. 208–9: see also Macionis, J. Sayers, J. 135
Pollack, O. 278 Scafe, S.: see Bryan, B.
Pollack, S. 182 Scambler, A.: see Scambler, G.
Pollert, A. 62, 110, 238, 250–1 Scambler, G. 178, 217
Poovey, 210 Scase, R.: see Goffee, R.
Popay, J. 172 Scott, J. 17
Porter, T. 366 Scott, S.: see Jackson, S.
Poster, M. 360–1 Scully, D. 183–4, 292
Potter, E.: see Alcoff, L. Seabrook, J. 222
Prandy, K. 305 Seager, J. 82
Pringle, R. 231, 240, 253, 257, 356 Segal, L. 292
Prout, A.: see James, A. Seidler, V. 2
Shakespeare, T.: see Barnes, C.
Quart, A. 118, 125, 127 Shaklady Smith, L. 281, 283–4
Shapiro, R. 182
Radford, J. 299 Sharpe, K.130, 216–7
Radner, H. 131 Sharpe, S. 94, 106
Radway, J. 350–1 Shaw, J. 98
Ramazanoglu, C. 264, 300 Sikes, P.: see Measor, L.
Randall, V.: see Lovenduski, J. Sillaste, G. 162
Rattansi, A. 381: see also Braham, P. Silva, E. 170
Reay, D. 89–90, 100, 102: see also Lucey, H. Simon, W. 203, 208: see also Gagnon, J.

417
AUTHOR INDEX

Skeggs, B. 89, 91, 114, 252 Tyler, M. 13, 254, 264: see also Abbott, P.,
Skellington, R.: see Braham, P. Hancock, P., Russell, R.
Skelton, C. 99, 101–3, 105–6: see also Twigg, J.: see Baldwin, S.
Francis, B.
Slater, E. 213 UNICEF 60, 119–120, 156
Smart, B.: see Smart, C. United Nations xii, 61, 94, 107–8, 118, 121,
Smart, C. 118, 280, 293–4, 380–1: see also 127, 130, 142–3, 182, 189, 221, 279,
Silva, E. 288
Smircich, L.: see Calas, M. Ussher, J. 133–4
Smith, D. 5, 12, 305, 365, 374
Smith, L. J. F. 296 Van Ecke, E.: see Volman, M.
Solomos, J. 71 Versey, J. 106
Sontag, S. 224 Versluyen, M. 190–1
Spencer, H. R. 193 Villemel, W.: see Williams, L.
Spender, D. 106, 109, 355–7, 361 Vincent, J. 136
Spivak, G.C. 54, 364 Volman, M. 106
Spring-Rice, M. 178 Voronina, O. 151, 165, 234
Squires, J.: see Kemp, S.
Srinivas, L. 359 Wade, A.: see Smart, C.
Stacey, J. 319 Wajcman, J. 105, 263
Stafford, R.: see Branston, G. Walby, S. 39–40, 61–63, 67, 167, 266, 270
Stanko, E. 264, 288 Walker, A. 137, 140
Stanley, L. 158, 370, 372, 376–8, 384 Walker, G.: see Penfold, P.S.
Stanworth, M. 65, 100, 188 Walkerdine, V. 89, 101
Stewart, F. 227 Walklate, S. 274, 277, 281, 288, 295–7
Stones, R. 17 Walkowitz, C.: see Allen, S.
Stopes, M. 200–1, 213 Walkowitz, J. 219, 309–310
Storey-Gibson, M.J. 140 Wallace, C. 104–5, 128–130: see also
Stott, N.: see Pill, D. Abbott, P.
Strinati, D. 323, 328–9, 331, 339–340, 344, Wallace, G.: see Ruddock, J.
363 Wallbank, J.A. 168, 170
Sturges, J. 263 Walsh, J. 248
Sutherland, E. 281–2 Walton, P.: see Taylor, I.
Warrington, M. 104–5
Tancred, P. 265 Waylen, G. 317
Tarling, R. 277 Weber, M. 61, 65, 326, 332
Taylor, B.: see Phillips, A. Weedon, C. 40, 45, 50, 55
Taylor, I. 279 Weeks, J. 198, 203–4, 223, 230
Taylor, S.: see Tyler, M. Weiner, J.S. 97, 305
Therborn, G. xi, 60–3, 119–121, 127, Weitzer, R. 216
151–4, 156, 161–2, 166, 170, West, J. 227
188, 204, 209, 215, 221, 227, Westwood, S. 239, 250
279, 288 Whitehead, M. 140, 176
Thomas, C. 88 Whittaker, D. 220
Thomas, K. 92 Wilcox, R. 359
Thorne, B. 148 Wilkinson, H. 52–3
Tiano, S. 83 Williams, A. 179
Tindall, V. R. 180 Williams, C. 254, 256
Tomassini, C. 140 Williams, J.P.: see Wilcox, R.
Toner, B. 291, 294 Williams, L. 257
Tong, R. 33, 56, 167–8, 351 Williams, R. 322, 340
Townsend, P. 336 Williamson, J. 329
Tsaliki, L. 359–60 Willis, P. 7, 110–111, 336, 342
Tuchman, G. 318, 345 Willmott, P. 147: see also Young, M.
Turner, B.S.: see Elliott, A. Wilson, E. 217

418

Wilson, E. S. 180
Wilson, F. 264
Winn, M. 118
Winship, J. 347–8, 350
Wise, S.: see Stanley, L.
Witz, A. 62, 67, 191, 235
Wolf, N. 53, 131, 223, 319, 345
Wollstonecraft, M. 308–9
Wolpe, A-M. 100, 109, 111: see also
Kuhn, A.
Woodside, M.: see Slater, E.
Woodward, D.: see David, M.
Woolf, V. 61
AUTHOR INDEX
World Health Organisation 127
Worrall, A.: see Carlen, P.
Wright, H. 213
Yeatman, A. 380
Young, I.M. 44, 57–8, 131
Young, J.: see Matthews, R., Taylor, I.
Young, M. 164: see also Willmott, P.
Younger, M.: see Warrington, M.
Yuill, C.: see Barry, A.M.
Yuval Davis, N.: see Anthias, F.
Zanaty-el, F. 163
419
 Subject index

Abortion 127, 167, 177, 182, 187, 191, 201,
215, 304, 310, 347
Activism: see Politics
Adolescence 126–132: see also Sexual
double standard, Sexuality
Adulthood 132–5
Advertising: see Mass media
Age 3, 59
as socially constructed 117,
Ageing
and sexuality 134–5,
ageing populations 117, 137–141, 247,
ageing and poverty: see Poverty
feminist perspectives on 137,
sociological perspectives on 135–6,
retirement 140–1,
Ageism 141
Agency 8, 20, 21, 145, 214, 217, 248
Androgyny 32, 34
Anthropology 321–2
Anti-feminism 370
Apprenticeships 105, 232
Assaults on wives and partners: see Family
Assisted reproduction: see Pregnancy and
childbirth
Backlash xi, 51, 173
‘Bedroom culture’: see ‘Culture of
femininity’
Biological determinism 8, 21, 63, 135, 218:
see also Sexuality
Birth control: see Pregnancy and childbirth
Body, the 5, 34, 46, 131–5, 168, 211–2,
217–9, 226, 252, 264, 309, 311, 354,
380
‘Bricolage’ 337
Buffy the Vampire Slayer 6, 160, 359
Camp 222–4
Capitalism 21–3, 28, 44–5, 73, 136, 146–7,
151, 158, 174, 224, 265–6, 268, 270,
282, 319, 325–6, 330–2
Caring: see also Disability, Family, Work
Caring professions: see Work
Caring work: see Work
Informal health care 171, 190, 195–6,
314–5,
Caste xii, 58
Cheerleading 358–9
Child abuse 123–4, 273, 278, 290, 309
Child care 64, 156, 196, 238–9, 246: see also
Work
Childbirth: see Pregnancy and childbirth
Childhood 117–126, 200
child labour 118,
global experiences of 118–121, 125,
mortality 120,
sociological perspectives on 125–6,
spending 125–6,
Class: see Social class
Clerical work: see Work
Clitoridectomy 34, 49, 198, 288, 310, 364
Cohabitation: see Marriage and
cohabitation
Commercial surrogate motherhood: see
Motherhood
Compulsory heterosexuality 91, 198, 212,
222, 264, 319
Cosmetic surgery 131, 220
Crime: see also Sexual violence
committed against women 288–299,
committed by women 274–9,
degeneration theories of 272,
differential association theories of 280–2,
disorganisation theories of 280–1,
feminist theories of 278–286,
‘hidden’ 277–8,
labelling theory of 273, 280–1, 283–4,
Marxist theories of 282,
positivist theories of

420

radical feminist perspectives on 286,
self-report and victim surveys of 277–8,
299,
social construction of 272–3,
social control theory of 284–286,
violent: see Sexual violence
Criminal justice
class inequalities in 273, 278, 281–2,
gender inequalities in 279–80, 283–5,
288–90, 293,
juvenile 280, 283–4,
racial and ethnic inequalities in 273, 278,
sentencing 275–6, 283,
Criminal statistics 281, 299
Critical criminology: see Crime
Critical gerontology: see Ageing
Cultural capital 65, 322
Cultural Studies 323–5
malestream schools of thought
feminist critique of
Culture 318: see also Language, Mass
media
consumer 86, 118, 125–7, 131–2, 224,
362,
high 322, 324,
industries 323, 325, 330–2, 350,
mass 322, 325, 330–2, 334, 362,
media 118, 124, 125, 141, 158, 160,
323,
popular 322, 325,
postmodern forms of 338–40,
sub- and counter- 128, 337–8,
youth 128–130, 335–8,
‘Culture of femininity’ 129, 341–2
Cyberfeminism 54–5, 359–61: see also New
media technologies
Deconstruction 42, 79–80, 368, 379–80
De-patriarchalization xi, 62
Development 83–6
Dialectics 45–6, 373
Disability 3, 76, 137, 140: see also Politics,
Sexuality, Stratification
and caring 79,
and impairment 78,
and work 77,
feminist perspectives on 79–80,
politics 77, 311,
social model of 76–8,
Division of labour 10, 111, 146, 373: see also
Family
Divorce 118, 149, 153–5, 163, 262
Domestic violence: see Family
Dowry 4, 60, 120, 288, 310
Drag 207
SUBJECT INDEX
Education
comprehensive, co-educational schooling
98, 101–2, 123,
differential curricula 99, 123,
ethnic differences in 89–91, 94–5,
112–113,
feminist perspectives on 109–113, 308–9,
gender stereotyping in 98, 100, 105,
girls’ achievements in 91–5, 104,
global inequalities in literacy and
education 61, 107–8, 130–1,
‘hidden curriculum’ 100, 107,
higher 91–4, 97, 104, 128, 173,
history of girls education 95–9,
masculinity in 104–5, 114–115,
National Curriculum 89, 98–9, 101, 103,
113,
primary and nursery 94, 100, 102,
school textbooks 101–2,
social class inequalities in: see Social
Class
Enlightenment, European 21–22, 42–5, 47,
54, 379–80, 382
Epistemic communities 382–3
Ethnocentrism xiii, xiv, 48–9, 51, 59, 223,
321, 352
Factory work: see Work
Family xii, 171: see also Ideology
and caring 36–7, 118, 172, 233–4, 239–40,
307–8, 312–13, 351,
and ethnicity 75,
diversity in family forms 144, 151–151–7,
domestic labour 36–7, 39–40, 119–120,
146, 151, 156, 159, 161, 163–5,
231–3, 236–240, 350,
dual income families 70: see also
Parenting
feminist approaches 147–9,
power relations and money 160–161,
single-parent 118, 124, 126, 133, 144,
155–7, 166, 200, 282, 314–5,
single-person households 140,
sociological perspectives on 145–7,
step-families 124, 153,
symmetrical family 147,
violence 4, 120, 162–3, 189, 287–8,
295–9,
wage 148–151, 155, 160, 235, 312, 314,
‘Family planning’ 127, 177, 215
Female circumcision: see Clitoridectomy
Feminist critique of sociology: see Sociology
Feminist epistemologies 368, 370–381: see
also Epistemic communities,
Feminist theory, Knowledge
421
SUBJECT INDEX
feminist empiricism 371–3, 380,
feminist constructivism 375–8,
feminist standpoint epistemology 373–5,
380, 382–3,
postmodern feminist epistemologies
378–83,
Feminist politics: see Politics
Feminist research 16, 366–70, 370, 379: see
also Research Methods
Feminist theory 16, 27–8, 364–5, 384: see
also Feminist epistemologies
Black and post-colonial xiii, 28, 47–51,
53–4, 75, 307, 321, 375, 378,
critical 28, 44–7, 373,
dual systems 28, 38–40, 282, 373,
liberal 28, 371,
Marxist 27, 28, 36–8, 238, 341, 373,
materialist: see critical
postmodern 9, 27, 28, 40–44, 52–4,
radical 27, 28, 238, 307, 365,
reformist: see liberal
socialist: see dual systems
First wave feminism 306–9
Foot binding 34
Frankfurt School 44, 330–3, 340, 362
feminist critique of 341, 349,
‘Gay villages’ 222, 224–5
Gender
‘doing gender’ 8, 64,
inequalities 60–4, 358–9,
order xii, 60,
pay gap 246–8, 266,
socialisation 8, 19, 107, 145, 147, 178,
208, 264–5, 273, 282, 318,
Gender Studies 1,
Genderquake 51, 91
Genital mutilation: see Clitoridectomy
Girl Heaven 126
‘Girl power’ 131, 358
‘Glass ceiling’ 262
Gynocentrism 12, 33: see also Sexual
difference
Hegemony 209, 222, 227, 263, 311, 324,
325–7, 333, 337, 342, 346, 362
Health and illness
gender differences in 174–9,
in childhood 118,
racial and ethnic inequalities in 177, 179,
182,
social class inequalities in 172, 175, 182,
Health care: see Caring, Work
Heterosexual matrix 9, 63, 222
‘Hierarchy of sex’ 205
422
HIV/AIDS 120–121, 180–1, 214, 220–1,
223, 226–7, 288
Homophobia 114, 206–7, 212, 223, 351
Housework: see Domestic labour
Human trafficking 83, 221
Iatrogenic medicine 180–3
Idealism 25
Ideological State Apparatus’s (ISAs) 326–7,
362
Ideology 6, 233, 285, 334, 344
familial 129, 144, 152, 157–8, 240, 311–3,
Marxist theories of 325–7, 362,
patriarchal 6, 7, 84, 200, 203, 212, 238,
279, 282, 292, 310, 319–320, 325,
348,
Illness: see Health and illness
Industrialisation 21, 38, 84, 148–151, 191,
217, 232, 234–6, 270
Internet, the: see New media technologies
Iron Maiden, the 319
Knowledge 18, 22, 109, 365–8, 370, 379: see
also Feminist epistemologies
Labour market: see also Skill, Work
segmentation 70, 160, 235–6, 241–2,
socialisation for 113,
women’s position in 20, 140, 157, 219,
233, 235, 238, 240–250, 264,
314–5,
Language 41, 318, 324, 328–9, 378, 380
as man made 355–7,
feminist criticisms of ‘man made’
language thesis 214, 222, 357–8,
feminist perspectives on 354–5,
Leisure 231, 321, 323
Linguistic sexism: see Language
Linguistic turn 358–9
Madonna 6, 50–1, 321
‘Male gaze’ 319–20
Managerial work: see Work
Marriage and cohabitation 19, 69, 89, 91, 94,
100, 111, 117, 130, 132–3, 144–5,
152–4, 158–9, 167, 199
arranged marriage 161–2, 310,
child marriage 118–120, 310,
Marxism 22–3, 36, 41, 44–47, 236–7, 325–6:
see also Feminist theory, Social class
Masculinity 2, 7, 60, 212, 218, 254–5, 263–5,
281, 292, 311, 351, 379: see also
Education, Mass media
Mass media xii, xv, 72, 318, 324: see also
Culture, New media technologies

advertising 218, 223, 226, 233, 264, 324,
340, 344–7, 354,
audience reception studies of 334–5,
feminist studies of
romantic fiction 350–1,
soap operas 348–50,
women’s magazines 342–4, 347–8,
representations of masculinity 334–5,
350–4,
representations of women 318, 346–7,
350,
McDonaldization 324–5, 332–3, 361–2
Medical
images of women 183–5,
power 171–4, 182,
Men’s Studies 2, 351–2
Methodology 3, 65, 366–70
Metanarratives 22, 41–3, 45–7, 372, 380
Midwifery 191–5
Migration 47, 71, 74–5, 82, 240
Morbidity: see Health and illness
Motherhood 5, 39, 89, 94, 101, 111, 117,
130, 134, 145, 156, 165–7, 186, 195,
304: see also Parenting, Work
commercial surrogate 167–8,
National Statistics Socio-economic
Classification (NS-SEC): see Social
Class
‘New Man’: see Mass media
New media technologies 216, 219, 224,
324, 338, 359–61: see also
Cyberfeminism
‘New Woman’: see Mass media
Nineteenth century feminism: see First wave
feminism
Non-sexist research: see Feminist
epistemologies
Nursing 192–5, 254, 255–6, 260
ethnic and class divisions in 195,
Otherness 5, 42–3, 80, 218, 226
Outsourcing 85, 118
Patriarchy xi, xii, 33, 38–40, 61–61–2, 67, 75,
110, 163, 198, 238, 266, 270, 319,
360
Parenting 133, 165–8: see also Motherhood
working parents 118, 156–7,
Phallocentrism 42–3, 199
Politics: see also Disability, First wave
feminism, Second wave feminism,
Suffragettes
feminist 16, 50, 215, 306–11, 365, 379,
gay and lesbian 206–7, 224,
SUBJECT INDEX
welfare 311–12,
women’s participation in 130, 139, 303–6,
Pornography 118–119, 198, 211–2, 215–6,
219, 226, 286, 318, 360
Post-colonialism 47–8, 53–4, 71, 218–9, 227,
382: see also Feminist theory
Post-feminism (as an historical period) xi,
52–3, 91, 311, 347
Post-industrial society 13, 267–8
Postfeminism (as a theoretical perspective)
51, 53–5, 59: see also Cyberfeminism
Postmodernism xii, 22–3, 25, 26–7, 40–44,
53–4: see also Culture, Sexuality
Post-natal depression: see Pregnancy and
childbirth
Poverty
and ageing 136, 140–1, 247,
and childhood 121, 142, 156–7, 176,
and development 82–5, 118, 219,
and health 172, 175–6, 196,
women and 313–6,
Pregnancy and childbirth 80, 132–5, 171,
174–5, 186–7, 190, 369 see also
Motherhood
assisted reproduction 168, 185, 187,
contraception 174, 179–183, 192, 201,
209, 215, 304, 310,
maternal mortality 173,
medicalisation of 171, 178–9,
outside of marriage 145, 155,
post-natal depression 166–7,
teenage 119–120, 127, 156,
Professional work: see Work
Promiscuity 8, 129, 133, 205–6, 222–3,
280
Prostitution 168, 198, 211–2, 215–220,
226, 283, 286–8: see also Sex
tourism
child 118–120, 127,
Queer theory 207–8
Racism 47, 71–3, 101, 203, 218, 226, 321,
352, 359: see also Sexuality,
Stratification
institutional 74
Rape: see Sexual violence
Realism 25–6
Reflexivity 369, 376–8
Refugees 82, 120
Relativism 42, 45
Religion xii, 49–50, 53, 62, 162
and sexuality 200, 202, 204, 208–9, 212,
Reproductive technologies: see Pregnancy
and childbirth
423
SUBJECT INDEX

Research methods 327–9, 337, 344–7, 366, global division of 269,

384 inequalities in 89–90, 98, 110–111,
Marxist theories of 66,
Second wave feminism 27, 290, 310 measures of 68–9,
Semiotics: see Research methods sociological analysis of 65, 160,
Service work: see Work system in Britain 67–9,
Sex/gender distinction 8, 63, 78, 210 Weberian theories of 66–7,
Sex determination tests 61, 120, 288 Sociological imagination 4, 18, 20, 55, 384,
Sex tourism 82, 127, 218–9, 221 Sociology
Sex work:see Prostitution, Sex tourism feminist critique of malestream xiii, xiv, 1,
Sexology 200–203 2, 9, 17, 33, 303–6, 364–7, 369, 371,
Sexual difference xii, xv, 1, 12, 17, 40, 43, 45, 373, 376, 383–4,
53, 75, 117, 146, 232, 263, 340, 352, feminist sociology 11, 318, 365–6, 368,
384 historical development of 10, 21–23,
feminist perspectives on 29–31, male domination of 2,
ideologies of 6, 7, 10, 217, political 303–5,
Sexual double standard 129, 200, 203, 211, Spice Girls xi, 51, 131
214–5, 358 Sport and exercise 131
Sexual harassment: see Sexual violence Stratification xii, 57–9
Sexual script 203, 208, 227 and age 117,
Sexual violence 83, 198, 211–2, 215, 220, and sexuality: see Hierarchy of sex
286–300, 318: see also Family class-based: see Social class
and race 215–6, disability and: see Disability
explanations of 289–290, gender-based 59–64,
fear of violence 286–7, 291, 299, global forms of 80–86,
harassment 35, 60, 83, 100–1, 110, 211, racial and ethnic 70–5,
223, 264, 287–8, 299–300, 309–310, Structuralism 326
360, Structuration 21
rape 60, 120, 162, 211–2, 216, 286–8, Suffragettes xi, 308: see also First wave
290–5, 309–310, 360, 381, feminism, Politics
Sexualisation 86, 202
Sexuality xv, 3, 331: see also Adolescence, Unemployment 249–250
Ageing, Religion, Sex tourism
and disability 79, 198, 211, Veiling 49
and race 50, 203, 225–6, Virginity testing 126–7
and work: see Work Voting: see Politics
essentialist perspectives on 199–203,
222: see also Biological Welfare state: see Politics
determinism Witch hunts 34, 191
feminist perspectives on 198, 210–212, Women healers 171, 190–1
309–310, Women’s magazines: see Mass media
modernist 202–3, Women’s Studies 1, 2, 365
postmodern 206–210: see also Queer Work xii, 38–40, 124, 128: see also Child
Theory care, Gender, Labour market,
sociological perspectives on 203–6, Skill
women’s experiences of 7, 201, 213–5, and motherhood 244–5,
young women and 126–7, 214–5, changing nature of 267–269,
279–280, 299–300, 357, ethnographic studies of
‘Simulacra’ 338–9 care work 190–5, 252: see also
Sisterhood 34, 53–4, 310 Midwifery, Nursing
Skill 241, 250–2, 265–6 clerical work 70, 253,
Social class factory work 250–2,
changing nature of 58, service work 52, 89, 254–5,
differences amongst women 149–151, gendered organisation of 234–36,
176–9, 184–5, 240, 306–311, gendered patterns of 242–6,

424

home-based 74,
managerial work 261–4,
men doing ‘women’s work’ 255–7,
part-time 64, 91, 232, 234, 242–3,
245, 247–8, 259–260, 262, 266,
315,
SUBJECT INDEX
professional work 67, 190–5, 204,
258–261,
racial and ethnic inequalities in 239, 250,
semi-professional work 94,
sexuality at 223, 241, 254, 264–5,
women’s orientations to 248–9,
425